Hatteras Blue (13 page)

He popped up beside the boat and took a few breaths. That had been easy. Underwater work was like that. You could never tell in advance how hard a job was going to be. Long as I'm in the water, he thought, might as well check the stern tubes and props. They would in all likelihood be at sea for several days. Off Cape Hatteras, that had to mean at least one storm. He took a few deep breaths, then surface-dived and frog-kicked aft.

The stern tubes were all right, though he could see he'd need new zincs soon. The props were all right. But he approached the cylinder hung from one of the shafts more cautiously. He parked himself sculling in the water and looked it over from two feet away.

It was a foot-long, three-inch tube, dull gray. Attached to his starboard shaft by a loop of cheap yellow polypropylene rope. Strategically placed, right underneath the fuel tanks. It was meant to kill.

Galloway began to want air. Sculling his hands, he moved closer. The yellow rope did not foul the prop, which meant that his first thought, that it was rigged to go when the shaft began to turn, was wrong. That left two other possible means of detonation. Either it was set for time, or for tampering of other motion. There was no sound from it, no clicking of an escapement, no bubbles from a burning fuze. But he had to assume it was the former. Or was it?

The desire for air became a need. He'd been down for over two minutes. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface. When he did, coming up off the counter, there was no one in sight on deck.

"Keyes!"

"Yes?" The blond man looked over the gunwale, impatient. 'You finished down there yet?"

"We've got a bomb on our hull."

"A
bombr

"Gray, a foot long. Protrusion on one end, crimped off. Probably a time detonator, the acid type."

"We've got to get rid of it."

"No shit. Throw me a knife."

Seconds later he handed the tube up. Keyes set it gingerly on the deck, then turned to Hirsch, who stood looking at it, her eyes wide. "Can you run this boat?"

"Y ... yes."

"Get it started. Quick!"

He turned to haul Galloway out as the engines sputtered and banged, then tossed off the stern lines as Tiller sprinted for the bow. Hirsch jerked the boat backward into the stream. She twisted savagely with the engines, missing the pier by no more than a foot, and then gunned out of the basin, leaving behind a roostertail of white water and a swell that set the other boats nodding and jostling at their moorings.

The throttle was full forward as
Victory
; still accelerating, skidded into the channel, hitting the waves like a skipping stone. She howled for the sound. Fishermen stared at them from small boats, and a water-skier swerved abruptly and went head over heels into the water. Galloway hesitated, then picked the thing up. "Get rid of it!" shouted Keyes.

"Too many people around," shouted Galloway. He was tearing at one of the new coils of line. He lashed one end to the tube and tossed it over the stern, paying out as quickly as he could. It bounced gaily in their wake, twenty feet, forty feet, a hundred feet astern in the roiling white water.

They were a mile out when, at the top of a porpoising leap, it went off, blowing a meter-deep crater in the Pamlico and sending spray a hundred feet into the air. The concussion boomed across the water.

When it had died astern, the mist drifting back down through brown smoke to rejoin the sea, Galloway motioned Keyes forward. But only to the front of the pilothouse. He looked up; Hirsch, at the wheel, was out of sight. They were still at full speed, the wind whipping past them and the cutwater hissing.

He turned suddenly. "All right," he said, his voice low and vibrating like a stressed rope. "Explain, and explain fast, and explain right now. Who put that bomb on my boat?"

"I don't know."

"This is serious shit, Keyes! Somebody found out we're asking questions, and they don't like it."

"I understand that, Captain." The other man's voice was cool. "I'm not stupid. But it's good news. What it means to me is that what we're after exists."

"What are we after? Who else wants it? And don't tell me you don't know! I'm not buying that line anymore!"

"All right," said Keyes icily. "I won't. I do know. But I won't tell you—yet. You're making money, aren't you?

You'll make a lot more. That's a promise. But if you want to get curious, there are lots of other skippers on Hatteras."

They stared at each other for a moment more. Then Galloway turned away. He balanced himself around the pilothouse and climbed the ladder to the tuna tower.

He took the wheel from Hirsch. As soon as she let go of it she suddenly sat down on a thwart.

"Nice work, Bernie. You really made the old bitch move."

"What's going on?" said Aydlett angrily from behind them. "Damn, Tiller, I thought you two turkeys was all I had to worry about. You mean they's somebody else after you?"

"After us," said Galloway. "Partner."

Aydlett showed his teeth in a rueful smile.

Bernie's face changed then. "Tiller—
Mister
Galloway—"

"Uh-oh."

"Below." She pointed down, into the cabin.

Galloway gave Aydlett the wheel. The big man wrapped one scarred hand around it and aimed the boat up the sound, not bothering with compass or chart. Below, Galloway pulled the hatch shut behind him. Hirsch was standing by his table. She had taken off her sunglasses and he could see how wide her pupils were.

''What is it?"

"Tiller." Her voice trembled slightly, but she looked resolute and very angry. "What the hell is going on? Was that something to do with you? With ... the drug thing?"

"I don't think so. A silenced twenty-two in the back of the neck, without a warning, is more the Baptist's style. And he's got no reason to. I pulled the time, I did it straight; he knows I didn't talk."

"Then it's got to have something to do with Keyes. With this Tarnhelm business. I warned you about him, Tiller."

"Big deal."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing."

"Don't play games with me, Galloway. You'd better get serious about this. I happen to be responsible for you to the Office of Corrections. I can yank your parole in a minute. And don't think I won't! My first duty is to protect the public. Only secondarily do I try to enhance the well-being of the parolee."

"Enhance my well-being," said Galloway. "Get off my back."

"I don't think so. You need my advice. You don't seem to have very good judgment about people, Tiller. Especially when they throw a little cash around. This Keyes—he's bad news. Anyone can see that. And this Shad—he's a thug if I ever saw one."

"Hold it right there! I grew up with Shad Aydlett. He's fishing folks, they talk rough, but they don't come any better. And Keyes—so he's not Mr. Law-abiding? Wise up, Hirsch. I've dealt with guys that make him look like a deacon. You have to take risks to make bucks. The bigger bucks, the bigger risks."

"That's a classic statement of the criminal mentality."

"Or the bond market."

"Not clever. I don't know what you're getting involved in. I don't think I want to, either. My advice is to turn around right now. Drop these two men, drop whatever they want with you."

"And live on what? The state of North Carolina's been paying my room and board for four years. Seems to me a little risk is worth accepting if it keeps me off the welfare rolls."

She didn't answer for a moment. Then she said, "There are other jobs. Real estate, construction, driving a tour bus. I don't know why I bother. Sometimes I think you're a real asshole, Galloway."

"Jam it. You've got your roles confused, Hirsch. You're my parole officer, not my wife. Dick says he doesn't know who tried to kill us. I believe him. He's hired me to do a job and I'm doing it. You see me doing something illegal, then turn me in. Till then, just butt out."

He turned and went back up on deck. Bernie stared after him.

"Bastard," she said, more than loud enough for him to hear.

nine

T
he gulls were the first to signal dawn.

The eastern sky was the color of their wings, and their harsh cries fell faintly as they soared on a freshening wind.

Galloway leaned against the wheel as light came to the sea. He stared out over the swells, humming under his breath. A snore came from behind him and he glanced back. Shad Aydlett had spent all night on deck, flaked out on a locker. His massive chest rose and fell like the tide.

Galloway was thinking about Keyes.

He didn't know much. And when he put together what he had, he came to a dead end.

He knew, had suspected from the first, that Hirsch was right. Keyes was no historian. That was just a cover. He was after something. He refused to say what, and so far Galloway had no idea what it was.

That, Tiller thought now, didn't bother him. If the man had a secret he was welcome to it, long as the paycheck came. The trouble was, someone else was after it too. And that someone else—presumably the old man who'd visited when Hirsch was aboard—had no problem at all killing people.

At last, coming up to the same dead end for about the fifteenth time that night and morning, he stopped thinking about it and bent to the old chart. His eye traced the smudged pencil line that was their track, too.

As Keyes had directed, he'd made
Victory
hard to follow. He'd held an easterly heading out into the Atlantic. Then, while an observant man on Coquina Beach might still have seen them without binoculars, he had turned north. He'd held that course till dark, till the multicolored sparkle of Virginia Beach loomed to port, until that observant man—whoever he might be, whatever he might want—might have concluded that their course led to New York City, the destination he'd filed by VHF with the Coast Guard listening watch at Oregon Inlet.

Throttled back to cruising speed, the old PT could stay at sea for days. If, Galloway thought, her engines didn't give out. But lower speeds extended her cruising radius immensely. Because of that he'd slowed to twelve knots when he finally turned off the running lights, came about, and pointed the bow south.

It was a long run down the North Carolina coast. The pencil line of their course paralleled the low, shifting sands, but stayed well clear offshore. In four centuries those shoaling beaches had claimed hundreds of sailing ships. The contrary fury of the Atlantic drove them helpless on lee shores, their anchors combing the fine sand bottom. Even powerful steamships like the iron-hulled
Huron
had been torn apart in the surf of the Graveyard.

Galloway knew the same thing could happen to him.

By midnight the hectic glitter of Nags Head and the thirty-second double flash of Bodie Island Light had dropped astern. Galloway picked up the loom of Hatteras Light shortly after that, about one. When he'd timed it he'd woken Aydlett, given him the wheel, and gone below for a loran fix. He had steered south by southeast since then through gradually steeper seas. As he'd expected, the weather worsened as they neared the cape. They'd passed the flaring white eye of Diamond Shoals Tower sixteen miles to starboard, and come a trifle farther east the last hour before dawn.

He checked the chart one last time, then idled the engine and went below to roust the others out. Hove to on the open Atlantic, forty miles from the nearest land, the old boat pitched sullenly to gray-green swells. Her engines muttered, clearing their throats from time to time as salt water covered the exhaust ports. The ocean around her was empty, save for the four-foot seas that came steadily in from the east, but above her the sky was filled with the high-topped cumulus that meant a possible storm.

Victory
was ready to begin the search.

When he came back up, carrying a deflated buoy, Aydlett was leaning over the chart.

"Mornin', Shad."

"H'o. Where we at?"

"Here."

The black man moved his hand slowly over the paper as if feeling the depth with his callused palm. "Right along this track here, where the old chart says."

"Yep."

Aydlett looked around at the sea and sky. His broad face took on a slow expression of doubt. He seemed about to say something, but just then Hirsch came up yawning and tousled, scratching her head. "Good morning," Galloway said to her.

"Uh."

"Is that one of my shirts?"

'Yeah. Want to make something of it?"

"No."

She paused, looking at the horizon. "Is that rain over there?"

He turned his head. Not far off to the east, a vaporous umbilical of gray united low clouds and dark water. A puff of cold wind made the buoy, flag flapping, fight to free itself from his hands. "Squall," he said. "We'll be getting wet soon. Can somebody give me a hand here?"

"Want me to take the wheel?" said Keyes, coming up from below. Galloway nodded to him. With the seas abeam
Victory
had rolled like a pig all night. The tall man had come topside twice to be sick This morning he looked drawn, but decent enough in clean Hawaiian trunks. His blond hair looked brown combed back wet, like alfalfa honey, and even darker tufts bristled on his bare chest.