Wildfire (48 page)

By activity, he was referring not only to the obvious dorsal fins, but also to schools of fish that might draw the presence of some of Exuma Sound's more dangerous predators.

"No, but that doesn't mean it isn't dangerous."

She realized, as soon as the words left her mouth, that she might have gone too far; but she tried to reassure herself that it was all part of the act. How would it look if she didn't act concerned, she told herself.

But that rationalization didn't stop a cold chill from running down her back.

"I'll stay in close to the boat," he said reassuringly as he reached for the face mask. "You stay up on top and keep a lookout. You see anything just rap on the hull three times. I'll be back on board in a flash."

"Uh—speaking of flashing . . ." she reminded.

Bloom glanced down at his exposed genitals and shrugged his shoulders as he cleared the face plate and then adjusted the mask and snorkel over his head. "I doubt that I'm going to shock anybody down there, especially at this time of night."

"That's not exactly what I was worried about."

"Well, then, how about if I promise not to get bit in any vital area?" he teased.

"They're your goodies, buddy-boy, not mine," she smiled back, "but try to be careful anyway. We may need them later on this evening."

Alfred Bloom winked in reply, took a deep breath, and then eased himself over the edge of the swim platform and into the dark water.

The water was relatively warm, and the visibility wasn't too bad with the diving light. But in spite of his brave talk, Bloom wasn't all that enthusiastic about diving under a boat at night by himself. He looked around quickly to convince himself—to the extent possible—that there really
wasn't
some nightmarish creature lurking out there in the dark shadows. Then, momentarily reassured, he used the slippery six-and-a-half-foot rudder as a guide to work himself carefully through the overlapping folds of torn fish netting until he could see the propeller. Thirty seconds later he surfaced next to the swim platform.

"I can't pull it loose," he gasped. "Wrapped around the shaft too tight. Going to have to cut it loose."

"Just make sure you don't get caught up in that netting," she warned.

"Right," he acknowledged, and then slipped beneath the surface again.

It was easier to find the propeller this time because he knew how the netting was twisted and he knew where he'd have to cut to get it loose.

He held onto the diving light and the net with his left hand, and was reaching for the knife when he felt a sudden surge of water pressure at his back.

The impact caught him from the side, just beneath his lower ribs, and slammed the air out of his lungs in an explosive gasp. He tried to respond, to fight back, but the shock was too great; his mind was numb with terror and his legs and arms suddenly seemed distant from his body. He had a brief moment of awareness, of being dragged down beneath the boat into the cold darkness, and of being unable to do anything about it.

Then his lungs filled with water, and the darkness became everything.

Chapter Thirty

The team of FBI agents had been cruising along the northern edge of the deep Tartar Bank—along a line about twelve miles off the southern shore of Cat Island—for over an hour, watching for any sign of the
Sea Amber
and Alfred Bloom, when the Coast Guard radioman stuck his head up through the rear bridge hatch.

"Agent Grynard?"

A1 Grynard turned around. "Yes."

"Got a guy calling in from the FBI crime lab. A tech agent Reggie Blackburn. Says he needs to talk with you real bad."

Grynard hurried down the ladder and went over to the port side of the main stateroom where the Coast Guard had set up a fairly elaborate communications center on the converted sports fishing trawler.

"Can you put it out on an open speaker?" he asked, aware that Hal Owens, special agent in charge of the FBI Special Bahamas Task Force, and Jim Whittman, the commander of the FBI's recently-arrived hostage recovery team, had followed him down the ladder.

"Yes, sir." The radio operator reached forward on his console and flipped a pair of switches. "Go ahead, sir."

"This is Grynard."

"Hi, Al, this is Reggie."

"I've got Hal Owens and Jim Whittman here with me. You got any good news for us?"

"Well, yes and no," the supervisory electronics specialist said, his voice sounding rough and scratchy over the marine radio link. "The good news is I got my computers reprogrammed, and the CART system back on line. The bad news is that the
Sea Amber
and the
Lone Granger
are gone."

"What? What do you mean,
gone?"
Grynard demanded.

"Just that. They've disappeared. I can't find them anywhere."

"How can that be?"

"I don't know," the FBI tech agent confessed. "We're still having to use the computer recognition system for the
Sea Amber,
so she could be hiding someplace where the satellite can't spot her. But the
Lone Granger's
a different story. Her SSRS transmitter just ain't squawking anymore."

Grynard cursed fervently and looked around at Owens and Whittman with his hands held palm up in disbelief. But then he remembered something.

"Reggie, can you give us a fix on their last known positions before your system went down?"

"I can do better than that. I can give you all the tracking data. You guys got a fax out there?"

Grynard looked down at the Coast Guard radioman who gave a thumbs up signal.

"Yes, we do."

"Okay, let me talk to the radio operator again, and then give me about five minutes."

Seven minutes later, the radioman handed Grynard a faxed map of Exuma Sound that showed one dotted line with the hand printed designation
"Sea Amber"
and a second dotted line marked
"The Lone Granger."

"Looks to me like they were both headed in the same direction," Owens commented. "Southern tip of Cat's Island."

"Which would be just about right, if Bloom really is on his way to your eleven o'clock meeting, and they're hot on his tail," Whittman added. "All we have to do is stake out the Cutlass Club and wait for everybody to show up."

Al Grynard stood there shaking his head slowly as he stared at the faxed chart.

"What's the matter?" Owens asked.

"I don't know, I guess I'm suspicious because it's too goddamned pat," Grynard muttered. "Nothing about this case has worked out this easy from day one."

"You complaining?" Owens asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No, not really." Grynard shrugged. "Probably just getting old and crotchety and tired of things going to shit every time I turn around."

"Probably can't do much about that other than offer you a beer." The special agent in charge smiled. "But the thing is, even if it doesn't sound right, I'm not sure we have any choice. We can't run any kind of aerial surveillance until daybreak. And even then, once we put those choppers in the air, everybody in the Islands is going to know that we're up to something down here."

"What about the response units?" Whittman asked. "Want to keep everybody back until we know what's going on?"

"I think we'd better," Owens said, looking to Grynard for confirmation, who nodded in agreement.

"Tell you what," Hal Owens said. "The three of us are dressed just about right for a night on the town, Cat Island style. Why don't we have the captain let us off outside the reef with the dinghy. We can motor in to the harbor, sit ourselves down in the bar, and wait to see who shows up. If it's just Bloom, then Jim and I'll make ourselves scarce and if that idiot with the four-bore shows up, then A1 and I are the ones who are going to disappear," he added, smiling at Whittman.

"Sounds like a plan to me." The hostage recovery team commander nodded agreeably. "Al?"

"Let's do it."

"Okay, Cutlass Club it is. Oh, and make sure you guys check out a life jacket," Owens added with a smile. "It's been a long time since I tried to navigate those reefs at night on my own."

Three and a half hours later, having safely navigated not only the offshore reefs and the unmarked entrance channel, but also several trips to the men's room of the Cutlass Bay Club, SAC Hal Owens contemplated the latest pot of fresh coffee with a definite lack of enthusiasm.

Then he looked up as Jim Whittman sat back down at the table.

"Well?"

"Starting to get pretty dead around here," the hostage recovery team commander muttered. "Couple of hard-looking types sitting in that little cubbyhole on the other side of the bar drinking beers. Aside from them, pretty much the same drunken assholes who've been here all evening."

"The two hard types look like they might be setting up on anybody?"

"If they are, they're pretty casual about it." Whittman shrugged. "Younger guy sounds like he's from Louisiana, Mississippi, or Arkansas. Talking about how nothing out here compares with night fishing for 'gators with his daddy. And if they're carrying, they've got it all hidden pretty good."

"Anybody outside?"

"Nope."

"Well, folks," Owens said, looking past A1 Grynard and Theresa Fletcher as he surveyed the mostly empty lounge that had long since been abandoned by most of the early-rising fishermen, "I hate to say it, but I think we've been stood up."

Chapter Thirty-one

At four o'clock that Sunday morning, a native boat captain, who had taken the same route from Old Bight out to the northwestern edge of the Tartar Bank for the past twenty-three years, cursed. He first heard and then felt the impact of a submerged object against the underside of his small boat.

Using a long gaff, he quickly discovered that the object in question was not a rock or a coral head—as he had feared—but rather, the aluminum mast of a large sailboat.

Five minutes later, the boat captain quickly pulled himself back into his boat, tossed his mask and fins aside, and reached for his radio.

An hour and a half later, a pair of divers from the Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Association pulled the bodies of Alfred Bloom and his sailing companion out of the water. A sleepy uniformed officer from the Royal Bahamas Defense Force was on hand to monitor the process.

The officer waited until the divers had laid the two bodies out on the deck of their dive boat. He stepped forward, examined both bodies for a few moments, and then yawned.

"So what do you think?" the officer asked the older of the two divers, a man with whom he had worked for several years.

"Looks to me like they got tangled up in a net. He went down first with a mask, to try to cut it away, and got caught. She went in after him, and in their panic, both of them became entangled and they drowned."

The uniformed officer nodded and made appropriate facial expressions to imply that he found such an explanation to be perfectly believable. Writing slowly, he filled a half page of his notebook.

"The name of the boat is the
Sea Amber,"
the diver offered.

The Bahamian officer's head came up quickly.

"Are you certain?"

The diver nodded. "Read the name off the stern. We'll go back down, see if we can find some ID for the victims, after we change tanks."

The uniformed officer seemed to contemplate that information for a moment. Then he said: "Did you happen to see anything to explain why a brand-new sailboat would sink by itself?"

If the diver happened to wonder why an official of the Royal Bahamian Defense Force would know anything at all about a sailboat that he hadn't even seen yet, much less that it was brand-new, he didn't say anything.

"Saw what looked like a pretty good-sized hole in the bow." The diver shrugged. "My guess is that after they got caught in the net, the boat drifted into the reef back there, holed the hull, and then continued drifting to about here where it finally sank."

"In other words, an accident?"

"Looks like it to me," the diver said.

The uniformed officer made one more entry in his notebook, then nodded in apparent satisfaction.

"All right," he said, "call me at my office when you find some identification."

"Aren't you going to wait?" The diver blinked in surprise.

"For an accident? No, of course not. I have much better things to do with my time."

Chapter Thirty-two

Harold Tisbury, chairman of the board of Cyanosphere VIII, and CEO of the ICER Committee, was trying to ignore his son, who was shaking his shoulder insistently and saying—over and over again, like a skipping record—that "sometimes the Tisbury women pay a higher price than we do, and sometimes that price seems more than we can bear," when the shaking became even more insistent.

"I'm sorry to wake you, sir," the butler said, "but Mr. Crane assured me that it was urgent."

"Mr. Crane?" The elderly man blinked, trying to focus his thoughts.

"Yes, sir."

"All right," Harold Tisbury nodded groggily, "Tell him I'll be right out."

Five minutes later Harold Tisbury emerged from his bedroom, teeth brushed, hair combed, and bathrobe tied, to find his son and the rest of the committee members sitting around the living room. Apart from Sam Tisbury and Walter Crane, both of whom were fully dressed, all the other men were similarly attired in bathrobes and slippers.

Crane waited until Harold Tisbury setded himself into one of the high-backed chairs.

"I apologize for the rude awakening, gentlemen," Crane said in a voice that suggested he was not the least bit sorry and would actually have preferred to have arrived an hour earlier, "but I thought you'd all want to be told, as soon as possible, that Alfred Bloom is dead. His body was recovered at five-thirty this morning about a mile off the tip of Hawks Nest."

There were gasps of astonishment and dismay throughout the room. Crane noted, with no great surprise, that some of the ICER members seemed far less dismayed than others.

"Walter," Harold Tisbury said hesitantly, acting as though he still wasn't sure if he was dreaming or not, "What happened?"

"There is some indication that he and his sailing companion both drowned when they attempted to disentangle themselves from a net that had become wrapped around their rudder and propeller."