The Vanishing Thieves (9 page)

“I have nothing to talk about,” Joe said evenly.

The tattooed man kneeled down before the boy and passed a piece of wire around his waist, twisted it tight and fastened an anchor to it. Then he rose to his feet. “I'll let you think about it a while. Soon as we're three miles out, I'll ask you again.”

He went to the bridge. As soon as his back was turned, Joe again inched forward on the seat of his pants. Then he swung around and gripped the wire cutters with his right hand. He twisted the jaws of the cutters toward the rope binding his wrists, but found it too awkward in a seated position. Slowly he struggled to his feet.

At that moment, Big Harry spotted a log floating in the water just ahead and made a sharp turn to port. Frank and Chet both slid toward the starboard rail. Joe started to lose his balance, almost recovered, but then Chet's sliding body crashed into him.

Joe's knees hit the rail and, head first, he pitched overboard!

The younger Hardy took a deep breath just before he hit the water. He sank swiftly, as the weight of the anchor pulled him down. Frantically, he twisted the wire cutters around until the blade gripped the rope binding his wrist. Desperately, he squeezed the handle.

The rope parted, but he was reaching the point where he had to release his breath, and he was still sinking rapidly. Then, as he brought the wire cutters around in front of him, they slipped from his grasp!

In a last-ditch effort, he reached out with his left hand, felt his fingers close over the blades, and guided the tool into his right hand to regrip the handle. Slowly letting out air from his lungs, he shoved the blades of the cutters around the wire and squeezed the handle.

As the anchor dropped away, Joe let go of the wire cutters and thrust himself upward. He had been dragged down so deep that his lungs emptied while he was only halfway to the surface. Rapidly scissoring his legs and using a powerful breast stroke to propel himself upward, he fought the terrible urge to inhale.

He was losing the battle and was on the verge of breathing in water when he suddenly broke the surface. Gasping, he drew in air, released it, and inhaled again. He treaded water as his breathing gradually returned to normal.

The
Sea Scorpion
was a couple of hundred yards away by now, slowly circling, as the men looked for him. He waved one arm and yelled, but it was too far for anyone to see or hear him. He started to swim toward the boat, but it circled farther and farther away. Finally the skipper gave up and continued out to sea.

As the
Sea Scorpion
disappeared from sight, Joe looked around. There was nothing but unending water in all directions. Fortunately the sea was relatively calm, though the water was cold.

Joe guessed that he was three to five miles from shore. If the sea did not get any rougher, he figured he could swim it, providing he stopped for frequent rests and kept in the right direction. He knew the coast was due east, and positioning himself by the sun, he hoped to avoid swimming in circles.

It was still early enough in the morning for the sun to be fairly low. Joe began swimming directly at it.

Meanwhile, aboard the
Sea Scorpion,
there was considerable confusion. Frank, Vern, and Chet anxiously kept shouting out for Joe, horrified at what might happen to him. As Big Harry circled around in search of Joe, he screamed at Crafty Kraft for allowing the accident to happen.

“It was you who made that sudden turn,” the tattooed man objected vehemently.

“Why'd you have to tie that anchor to him?” Big Harry yelled.

“I was just trying to scare him.”

“We'll see who gets scared when I report this to the boss,” Big Harry said grimly. “He didn't want anything like this.”

Frank and Chet took advantage of all the confusion and still calling out Joe's name, put their backs together as though to search for him in opposite directions. Determinedly, they began to pull at each other's wrist bindings. But as Big Harry gave up circling and resumed heading out to sea, Red Sluice noticed what was going on.

“Hey, those two are getting loose!” he shouted.

Red ran over to check Chet's bonds, Crafty bent over Frank, and Anton checked Vern. Frank had moved his back against the rail again so that the tattooed man had to approach him from the front. As he leaned forward to swing Frank around by the shoulders, the boy drew his knees to his chest, planted both feet in the man's stomach, and kicked as hard as he could. Crafty was thrown clear across the deck, hit the opposite rail, and did a back flip into the ocean!

“Man overboard!” Red Sluice yelled. “Turn around!”

As the boat began to circle, Anton grabbed a life preserver and tied a line to it. Frank and Chet swung their backs to each other again and Frank frantically picked at the knot binding Chet's wrists. Anton and Red were too busy looking for Crafty over the side to notice.

Frank loosened the knot and the rope fell away. Chet turned around and quickly untied Frank, while Red and Anton still hung over the railing, calling to their partner.

“All right, Harry! Red shouted. ”Slow down!“

Big Harry throttled the engine until the boat was barely moving, and Anton tossed the life preserver overboard. The man in the water grabbed it and Red began to reel in the rope.

Frank whispered to Chet, “Body blocks. Pretend you're on the football field.”

Nodding, Chet crouched as though on the scrimmage line. Frank did the same.

“One—two—three, hike!” Frank said.

In unison they drove forward to throw body blocks into the men at the rail. Screaming loudly, both hoods went overboard to join Crafty Kraft in the water.

“Untie Vern,” Frank said to Chet in a low voice, and headed for the bridge.

Big Harry, with his back to the action, had not seen his companions go overboard, and the noise of the engine had drowned out the screams and splashes. He seemed to sense, however, that something was wrong, and looked over his shoulder just as Frank came up behind him. Releasing the wheel, he started to spin around, but Frank managed to land a karate chop at the base of his neck.

Without making a sound, Big Harry pitched forward on his face, unconscious. Quickly the boy searched him for weapons. Finding none, Frank took the helm, while Vern and Chet stood at the rail, looking at the hoods in the water.

“Tell them to hold on to the life preserver,” Frank called out. “We'll be back for them after we look for Joe. ”

While the crooks clung to the life ring, Frank steered the
Sea Scorpion
back into the sun, fervent ly hoping that Joe had been able to free himself with the wire cutters.

A mile to the east Joe had stopped to rest for a time floating on his back.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of something sliding past him in the water, but did not get a good enough look to identify what it was. Letting his feet down until he was treading water, he turned in the direction the thing had moved, but saw nothing marring the gently rolling surface of the water. He decided it must have been his imagination and started to swim toward the sun again.

Then a movement to his left brought him to a halt. Treading water, he looked that way. A large gray fin broke the surface and swam widely around him.

With his heart pounding, Joe watched the fin going around again, this time in a narrower circle. The shark had spotted him when it originally went by, and was now closing in.

He submerged in order to get an underwater look at the beast. An enormous man-eating white shark over twenty feet long passed him no more than a dozen feet away.

Surfacing, Joe watched as the great fin cut the water in a wide arc that took it fifty yards beyond him, then swung back in his direction. This time it moved in a straight line, directly toward him!

As the fin neared, he dived in a desperate attempt to swim beneath it. But the shark had a fix on him now. It dived too, opening its enormous jaws wide

Joe froze in terror. The shark was almost upon him, when he suddenly saw a dark shape on his right, streaking in like a torpedo. Thinking it was another shark, Joe gave up all hope. But the shape, instead of attacking him, struck the shark's midsection. The monster veered aside, and even underwater Joe could hear a loud click as the enormous jaws snapped shut only inches away from him.

The dark shape moved away as fast as it had come in, only to be replaced by another torpedo-like object. It too drove into the shark's side at break-neck speed, then scooted off again. In rapid order, four more speeding forms bludgeoned the man-eater's side, making it flounder almost onto its back before it fled in panic.

Joe surfaced to see the gray fin moving away at express-train speed. It kept going until it disappeared from sight.

Then a graceful, hard-snouted figure arched through the air ten feet over Joe's head and came down in such a perfect dive that it hardly made a splash. Five similar shapes performed the same acrobatics, their crescent-shaped mouths seeming to grin down at Joe as they soared above him.

It was a school of six dolphins, the mortal enemies of sharks, but friends to humans. Joe remembered reading how dolphins occasionally attacked sharks by butting them at high speed with their hard snouts, sometimes even killing them by rupturing their hearts.

The dolphins continued to cavort about him, playfully showing off their acrobatic skill. Joe raised his hands above water to applaud loudly.

Meanwhile, Frank had headed the
Sea
Scorpion into the sun.

“You don't think Joe could have drowned, do you?” Chet asked, shivering at the thought.

“He had the wire cutters in his hand when he went overboard,” Frank said, his face drawn and his eyes clouded with fear. “If he acted fast, he could have cut both the rope and the wire around his waist in time. We can only hope.”

Chet glanced around. The lump in his stomach began to ache violently and his voice trembled. “Even i-if he got free of that anchor, how would we find him way out here? We could pass fifty yards from him without spotting him.”

“We'll start circling when we get back to where he was knocked overboard.

“If you can figure out where that is. I couldn't.”

“I don't think we sailed more than a mile beyond him,” Frank said. “I admit our starting point will be a blind guess, but we'll circle from there in wider and wider loops. We ought to hit the right spot eventually. ”

“Suppose we don't?”

“We'll run in and call the Coast Guard. They'll send up helicopters to scour the whole area. From the air, he'll be a lot easier to see.”

When they came to the spot where Frank figured Joe had been thrown overboard, he throttled down until the boat was barely moving.

“Okay,” he said to Chet. “You and Vern take posts on opposite sides of the boat and start looking.”

Chet moved back amidship to relay this instruction to Vern. Chet took the starboard side and Vern the port side as Frank steered the boat in ever-widening circles. Both boys strained their eyes intently looking out over the water.

When the circle had reached a half mile in diameter with no sign of Joe, Frank became discouraged. “I guess we better leave it up to the Coast Guard,” he said, his face ashen white.

“Wait. There's something over there!” Vern suddenly called out.

He pointed into the distance, and at once Frank reversed engines to bring the boat to a halt.

“It's not Joe,” Chet said glumly. “It's something jumping in and out of the water. In fact a lot of somethings.”

Frank squinted his eyes, and peered under his hand to see what Chet was talking about.

“Sea lions?” he asked.

“Why don't we go see?” Vern suggested.

Advancing the throttle, Frank steered the boat in the direction of the jumping animals.

As they neared, Chet said, “It's a school of porpoises.”

“Dolphins, I think,” Frank said.

“What's the difference?”

“Dolphins are porpoises, but porpoises aren't necessarily dolphins,” Frank explained. “It's like a nickel is a coin, but a coin isn't necessarily a nickel.”

Vern said, “He means dolphins are a special kind of porpoise.”

By now, they were within fifty yards of the cavorting dolphins. Chet exclaimed, “Hey, there's something in the water they're jumping over!”

Frank pulled the boat in closer.

“Hey, look! It's Joe!” Chet yelled to the others.

Either the approach of the boat, or the boys' relieved shouts, frightened the dolphins away. They raced off in formation, arcing in and out of the water as though they were riding some invisible roller coaster.