Hatteras Blue (15 page)

"Yeah, I see. About three hundred yards astern by now." He laid a finger against the depth markings. "At a hundred and eighty feet? I hope not."

"Leave it go?"

"Hell no. Whip her around. Let's make another pass."

She rolled the wheel, held it, shifted it as Galloway had taught her. She steadied the bow in the center of the smoothed path
Victory
left on the sea. "Nice turn," said Galloway. She grinned, and they both concentrated on the depth sounder.

"There!"

"Another pass, a little to one side."

She ran east again twenty yards to the left of the wake. The sounder showed a steady line at 185, 190 feet. The bottom was flat and unbroken.

"No good."

"Try forty yards the other way."

"Right."

They pitched to nose-on seas. The flared bow threw thin transparent curves of smaragd-tinted spray. A stray beam of sun, sneaking through the thunderheads made distorted squares flicker in and out of existence on the deck of the flying bridge.

Galloway nodded slowly as the trace peaked again. "There's something there, all right. Sizable. And look at those lighter traces, the yellow ones."

"Fish?"

"Big 'uns."

"Is that good?"

"You bet it is. Means the charter boys haven't found this one yet."

Galloway flicked the sounder open and tore off" the last foot of paper. He walked dividers across the chart and made a bold X, then fixed them like darts and wrote the latitude and longitude on the trace. "Okay," he said, staring at it. "We'd better get Dick. You mind?"

"Okay."

Excited, she swung down the ladder, legs flashing. Galloway turned the sounder on again and swung the boat in a circle. He braced himself against the window ledge as
Victory
came beam on to the seas. At the height of the flying bridge, each roll sent him in great swoops through the air.

Ten feet below him, Bernie heard the companionway hatch close behind her. She hesitated. It was darker than she'd expected. My eyes are dazzled, she thought. As they adapted she saw that Keyes wasn't in the main cabin. The dive locker, then. She worked her way forward, bracing herself against Galloway's bunk as the boat took several vicious rolls.

Reaching the forward door, she rapped lightly and went in, crossing the compartment to the two bunks. They were empty. She stopped again, puzzled, and as she hesitated she heard the door close behind her. She turned.

He was leaning against the closed door, watching her. One hand moved at his crotch; he was buttoning his trousers. The head, she thought. That's where he was. But why is he staring at me?

Then she remembered. Hie new swimsuit Perhaps the brazilian-cut bottom, the tiny bandeau top, were a little ... skimpy. She crossed her arms over her barely covered breasts. "I was sunbathing," she said "We're at sea, no one's around but us. It's what everybody wears at the beach now. Does it bother you? If it does, I'll—"

"Bother me?" He laughed, not taking his eyes from her. He thrust his hands into the pockets of the work cottons he'd borrowed from Galloway. "Would you like that?"

"No. I wouldn't."

"Of course." He took a step toward her, swaying as around them the hull launched itself into another corkscrewing roll. His eyes gleamed in the darkness. "It's a game to you, isn't it? I've watched you around Galloway. And around me. Teasing us. Being provocative—"

"Now wait just a minute, buddy. Just hold it right there—"

He cut her off. "Why? Let's get this straight. I think you're attractive. And you obviously need a man. Why not?"

"No!" She backed away, stumbled, and sat suddenly on one of the bunks as the boat rolled again. He was moving toward her when she said quickly, "You've got it wrong, believe me. But that's not why I came. Tiller sent me down. We've found something."

The words sent a visible shock through him. His mouth opened, then he grabbed for the hatch. It banged against the bulkhead.

She heard the three men shouting at once above her. But she sat still on the bunk, staring after him, trying to swallow a sudden sob of mingled anger, shame, and fear.

ten

A
bove her at that moment galloway was

cursing vividly. The port engine had quit as he was setting a grapnel. When he and then Aydlett had tried to restart it, without success, he scrambled aft and below with a flashlight and the crowbar to try shorting the starter switch. When he came back Hirsch, wearing one of his sweat-stained dungaree shirts, was sitting rigidly on a locker, her face turned away from the men. He did not notice her strained expression. Instead he threw the bar across the bridge. It clanged into a corner, throwing chips of paint.

"Shot," he said, and spat over the side.

"Trouble?" said Keyes.

"Not right away. One engine's enough for cruising. But if we need power, we're up the creek." He leaned into the windscreen. "Shad, let's try another run on her."

Aydlett rolled back to the bow. He moved fast for a big man, balancing himself without wasted effort against the uncertain rhythm of boat and sea. "Ready on the hook," he called back a moment later. The three-pronged steel grapnel looked like a household utensil in his huge hand.

Galloway lifted his eyes to the recorder once again. He put the remaining engine into gear, ran fifty yards ahead into the wind, watching the trace intently, and yelled "Drop!" at the same instant he slammed the props into neutral, then astern for a quarter-minute, then into neutral again.

Aydlett had carefully made up two coils, one on his left hand, the other on his right. At Galloway's word he swung the grapnel once, twice, around his head, and then it left his hand in an easy-looking arc that sailed it lightly over the crest of a sea. The first coil rose after it, unwinding in the air. Fifty feet ahead of the bow it disappeared with hardly a splash, and flashed downward into clear blue. The line kicked up salt foam as it hummed down after the grapnel, sucking rope off the coil left in his hand. At last it stopped. Aydlett cupped his hands and shouted back, "Bottom."

"Pay out."

"Pay out, aye." The waterman paid anchor line from a flaked heap on deck hand over hand as the wind car-tied them backward. A marker buoy went over the starboard deck edge, red stripes gay. When Tiller held up a closed fist he made the grapnel line fast to the big samson post where the anchor was bitted off and came aft.

"See it dragging?" Galloway said to Keyes.

"It's vibrating."

"That's right. Still in the mud—there it goes."

The line tightened. It rose gradually from the sea, dripping, then straightened suddenly as
Victory's
weight came against it.

"She's caught."

"We'll see." Galloway put the engine in gear astern. As the bow rose to a sea the line came taut again, this time weeping water along its exposed length. The propeller thrashed, but the boat stayed put, yawing with the off-center pull. "We caught something, all right."

"You think it's—"

"Can't tell from here, my friend. Got to take a look. You coming down with me?"

"Of course."

Bernie had come into the pilothouse and was looking at the chart. "How deep did you say it was here?"

"Bottom's between hundred-eighty and -ninety."

"That's deep."

"Damn deep. But that's bottom. Whatever's on it is sticking up twenty or thirty feet to make that trace. And we should have fifty or sixty feet visibility out here this time of year. So if there's anything interesting we'll be able to make it out from a safe depth." He pulled open a drawer and ran a finger down a plastic-paged pamphlet. "Say at a hundred-twenty feet. That gives us fifteen minutes stay time for a no-decompression dive."

"Say you two is going to skin dive down there now, Tiller?"

"Scuba dive. That's right, Shad."

"I reckon I'm comin' too."

"What! Like hell you are. You've never done any diving that I know of."

"Can't be that hard."

Galloway stared at the big man, mentally damning not Aydlett but himself; he should have anticipated this. "Look, Shad—it's not that it's hard. It's just complicated. There are lots of things that can kill you down there."

"I never saw nothin' come out of the sea I was afraid of."

"I don't mean animals. I mean decompression, the bends, turning the wrong valve and cutting off your air." He could see he wasn't getting through; Aydlett was looking increasingly suspicious. "I'm just not going to let you kill yourself down there, Shad."

"No?" said Aydlett slowly. "Seems like you suddenly taking real good care of us Aydlett brothers, Tiller. Like you took care of Mezey?"

Galloway saw the muscle bunch in the man's huge shoulders. He had to stop himself from looking around for a weapon. "You can think whatever the hell pleases you. But you're not going down."

"Tiller—"

"Butt out, Officer Hirsch. This hardheaded nigger and me been knocking each other around since we was old enough to bait a hook. You want to try to lay a couple on me, Shad? Feel free. Won't change my mind. May change yours."

"You're treadin' narrow line, Galloway."

"You're standin' on my deck, Aydlett. You dance to my shanty here, like everybody else aboard."

That was a principle even the big waterman had to admit. He saw the yielding in Aydlett's eyes first, even before the big fists reluctantly opened. "That's better. Now look, Shad, what I want is to have you be our safety man on the surface. I'll tell you what you need to know. But you got to break yourself in easy, you know? I'll dress you out, you can go in with us, but I want you just to watch. Don't go down farther than the keel unless you see one of us in trouble. Then come down like a burning barn."

"I reckon that will be all right," said Aydlett.

Galloway exhaled. He knew he'd only postponed the inevitable. Between his memory of his brother, his father's warnings, and his inbred wariness of whites, Shadrach Aydlett was far more dangerous aboard
Victory
than any explosive.

They slid down the ladder to the open deck aft. Galloway began opening lockers. Three aluminum single tanks bonged on the deck. He laid three metered dual-stage regulators beside them. "Dick."

"Yes, Tiller?"

"So far you haven't told me a lot about what you're after. Anything, in fact. Will you know it when you see it? Or will we have to look around for a name?"

"I'll know," said Keyes. He zipped a wet suit top, then paused. "All right if I skip the rest of the rubber this time ... Captain?"

"Sure. We shouldn't be down that long."

They sat on lockers and dressed out. Weight belts, gauges, knives. Keyes screwed a regulator to one of the tanks and inspected the hose as air hissed into it. He set the tank on the gunwale and slipped into the harness. He took a breath and spat the mouthpiece out, satisfied.

Galloway dressed quickly. He slipped on flippers last and looked across the cockpit at Aydlett. The fisherman had imitated the others as they dressed and had most of his gear on correctly. Galloway adjusted his mask for him and guided Aydlett's hand to various points as he explained the weight belt, the pressure gauge, the operation of the buoyancy compensator and the reserve valve. "Okay, that's pretty good," he said, standing up. "Dick—"

"I'm listening."

"There may be a current. We'll swim forward and go down the anchor line. Shad, it would be best for you to go forward with us and hang on there at five or ten feet while we're below." He held up his watch and tapped it. "Remember our stay time: fifteen minutes at a hundred and twenty. I'll lead. Stick with me."

Keyes heard him out, eyes expressionless behind the oval window of the mask. He nodded shortly.

"And Bernie—say, are you all right?"

"Yes."

'You'll be in charge up here. You know the drill, you've been out with us before."

"Be careful, Tiller."

"Always am. Back soon."

Galloway cut off further conversation by biting rubber and leaning backward, kicking himself away from the rolling hull.

He slammed into cool water. Bubbles foamed above him as he sank. He let a little of the ocean into his mask and revolved slowly, drawing his first hissing breath, into a floorless world of deep blue. Deep blue ... he felt free for the first time in days. That was what the sea meant. Here was no mourning, no regret, no vain imagining. Your needs and your fears were as direct and raw as those of its creatures, living without desire, destroying without hate.

Here he could forget.

Keyes and Aydlett appeared simultaneously in white bursts on the other side of the underwater hull. Yeah, there was a good surface current. The boat moved steadily away from him. Galloway swam forward against the current, a few feet below the surface. Wave action pulled him up and down. He reached the anchor line and grasped it, a thread of white slanting downward, its far end lost in a sapphire haze.

A tap on his shoulder. He looked back and up, biting the mouthpiece at a twinge in his back. He moved his shoulders to ease the tank and the pain disappeared. Keyes, above him, was motioning. Down?