The Passage (40 page)

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Authors: David Poyer

BOOK: The Passage
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“We're going to be deployed for Army-Navy.”
“Oh, yeah, us, too. What'm I thinking about? Well, we'll catch it on the tube. So long, buddy. Oh, and—”
Dan stopped as Prince did, looking up at the aft launcher, then glancing casually around. It was incredibly hot. The steel absorbed heat and radiated it again, cooking you from all sides. “What?” he said.
Prince extended an imaginary blade. He went to
en garde in quarte
, waited for Dan to respond, then lunged. Dan did a halfcircle parry and riposted to the inside; Prince beat parried, laughed, and they disengaged. Dan felt slow and clumsy. He'd fenced for only one semester before going to lacrosse, mainly because Prince had beaten him every time they put the masks on. He saw the OOD watching in astonishment from the far side of the quarterdeck.
“A touch, I do confess it.”
As they shook hands, Prince said in a low voice, “Dan, better lay off this homo stuff. It doesn't take much to make them think you're one.”
“I'm not.”
“I don't care if you are.”
Dan's gaze locked suddenly with his classmate's. “You don't? In there, you said—”
“What else am I going to say in front of everybody? Like I said, I don't care. But if you are or think you might be—that happens sometimes—do what you have to do. But don't talk about it … to
anybody, ever.
Understand?”
Dan stared at him, catching his breath—at Larry Prince, the deputy brigade commander the year they'd graduated, someone he'd known for years.
“Thanks for the advice,” he said quietly.
 
 
THEY were waiting by the brow when he got back. Jay Harper was standing by a pile of gear. Gary Lohmeyer was talking to the messenger. The damage control officer had asked to come along, said he was a diver, which had surprised Dan, since it didn't jibe with the impression he gave. Maybe he had misjudged the kid. Harper looked irritated as Dan trotted down the pier. “
There
he is. You about ready to go, shipmate?”
He and the chief warrant had had their “talk” out on deck one morning as a squall moved across the face of the water. To his surprise, Harper hadn't flared back at him. He just said quietly that yeah, he'd been in the wrong, that he wouldn't leave the bridge again. Dan had asked him then if there was something bothering him.
Harper had just shrugged. “I guess just that the King Snake is looking at punching out of this flea circus.”
“Retiring?”
“It's getting to be time.” The older man had looked off across the sea to where the sun braced the clouds with golden beams. “It's like after a while, the challenge is gone. There's nothing you haven't done a hundred times. No thrill, no kick.”
“And?”
“I'm just thinking about when,” Harper had said.
Now Dan told him, “Yeah, I'm ready. Let me run down, get my gear. Did you reserve tanks?”
“Waiting for us over near Base Ordnance. We'll swing by and pick 'em up in the truck.”
He was in his stateroom, pulling out fins and mask, when Hank Shrobo put his head in. Seeing him, eyes like used ashtrays, brought back all the last two weeks, deep in the complexities of signal-flow diagrams and fault isolation: the anxiety, the everpresent sense of urgency, the glimpses of hope, then despair as once again the solution eluded them. “Yeah,” Dan said. “Make my day; tell me you caught the Crud.”
“Not quite. But we're nailing the fence closed.”
“The battle problem?” Dan unwrapped his regulator, examined the hose.
“Oh … that. The program's almost finished. Then we'll load a clean tape and boot Elmo up.” Elmo was what Williams had started calling the ACDADS. “We just might make your captain's deadline.”
“Do you need me down there?”
“Not right now. Maybe for a test run later.”
“Good. But you look like shit. Want to take a break, go swimming? I got a spare mask—”
“I'd better not, but thanks. I don't swim very well.” The civilian seemed embarrassed by the invitation. What a strange guy, Dan thought. Could he be gay too? Or was he getting tunnel vision, like Harper had warned him about?
 
 
HARPER and Lohmeyer were waiting in the truck when he got back to the quarterdeck. He ran down the brow and threw his gear in, and climbed up.
Harper picked up the charged tanks at the Reef Raiders' shack, wedged them into the bed so they wouldn't roll, then headed south along the bay. The road clung to the hills, and as they bounced along, he could look off across the entrance to the airfield, and beyond that to the hills. They pulled off onto the sand not far from the lighthouse on Windward Point.
“Here it is,” said Harper with a grand announcing gesture, as if he owned it or had discovered it. “The best fucking diving in the western hemisphere.”
Dan looked out at it with the same mixed anticipation and dread he always had before a dive. Beyond the surf, the sea was a light blue, clear and pure, darkening rapidly to azure. Between blue and blue was a darker mottling, which meant sand between patches of grass or coral. Harper was telling them how nobody fished here, how clear it was. He pulled a speargun from behind the seat.
“They allow spearfishing here?” Dan asked him.
“You see anybody keeping tabs? There're groupers down there that'll swallow you alive.” He grinned. “Kind of like my fucking wife, you know?”
The surf creamed among dark jagged rocks. Lohmeyer went in first, balancing on his fins till a sea reared in front of him, then diving in over it. Harper waded in, skinny legs gradually submerging but perfectly visible, bent, as if they were both broken. Dan waited for a wave, then swam out through the surf line. When he put his mask under, he could see powdery white sand engraved with riffles and small white fish the color of the sand.
He followed the others out, watching bubbles swirl as their fins pulled air down into the water. White sand crept past beneath him. A pale fish with spines drifted a few inches above it. It didn't swim off as he approached. It just waited, lifting its spines slightly. He decided anything that confident had to be poisonous, so he angled back toward the heaving silver surface.
A greenish shadow took shape: a coral head. Beyond it was another. The sand made fine white paths between them, like
a Japanese garden. Angelfish browsed among the sea fans, and a school of blue tang angled away into the haze.
Silver bubbles drifted up. Lohmeyer and Harper sank slowly, hands to their masks. Dan felt for his mouthpiece, cleared it, and sucked a breath: air, cold and dry. He jackknifed down and the sea sealed over his head.
His breath squeaked and bubbled in his ears. He cleared them as he sank, then again. A sea turtle swam past a hundred feet away, thrusting itself through the water like a round rowboat. It trailed a huge appendage Dan hoped was its tail. They swam together over the coral heads, looking down. He kept craning around, looking for a 'cuda or a shark. But the enormous blueness seemed empty. Aside from the turtle, he didn't see anything at all, just the little chaetondontidae, bright as butterflies, that drifted in clouds above the coral heads.
Ahead, Harper pointed. Lohmeyer followed him around, angling left, and Dan, too. And they saw the wreck.
It lay at the base of a rock pinnacle. Reels of rusty steel cable sagged from the afterdeck. Hundreds of fish moved in and out of a black gape in its side, as if the wreck were breathing. The anchor chain stretched out across the bottom. Dan saw what looked like a circus wagon upright on the sand. As they closed, he saw it was a motor-generator truck, sitting on the bottom as if it had been parked there.
They investigated the wreck for a few minutes, then Harper pointed seaward. They followed him along the sloping bottom. Dan checked his depth gauge, then his watch.
As they dropped, the sea grew cooler against his skin. The light grew green, then blue. The vegetation dwindled. Again he noticed, with a thrill of apprehension, that there weren't any fish around at all now.
Then he saw where Cuba ended.
It was a drop-off, a sharp one. He checked his gauge again as they crossed the ragged rocky lip: 120 feet. Lohmeyer stopped and hovered, looking down. Harper glanced over his shoulder but kept swimming outward. Dan hesitated, then followed, feeling the upwelling in his face like a cold slow wind.
As they descended, a shudder crept up his back—a primeval fear of being trapped, of the dark, of the cold. It was deep blue above him; below, only an immense darkness. Was something moving down there? He imagined falling away into that abyss, being crushed … . No, the pressure wouldn't crush him; he'd just run out of air … a thousand feet deep out here … .
Something took shape from the blue-black. He blinked, not really comprehending what he saw. A steel hawser, big around as his thigh, stretched parallel to the cliff face. Coral festered slowly in
brainlike knots. Harper hovered above it, looking off to the right and then the left, to where it stretched into invisibility again.
Something jabbed his side and he almost cried out. But it was only Lohmeyer, holding up his tank gauge and pointing upward. Dan wasn't sure he wanted to go back up. Part of him wanted to keep swimming down till he understood the dark, fathomed it, grasped it, knew.
But maybe you couldn't understand it till you were part of it … .
Harper turned, saw them, and at last nodded slowly to Lohmeyer's urgent pointing toward the light.
 
 
HE ran out of air and surfaced half a mile out. He turned on his back and finned slowly shoreward, trying to relax as the sea washed over him and came down the snorkel. It tasted bitter and warm. He felt vulnerable, like a lure being trolled slowly across the surface. He couldn't think of anything that was likely to look better to a shark than he did, silhouetted against the surface.
But at last the bottom came into view again, and he rested, letting the waves toss him around. He couldn't see the others. He'd lost them when he had to surface. Finally, he decided to go in on his own.
He came in at a bad place and got knocked around, but finally he staggered out. He looked up and down the beach, but he was alone. He was wondering if he ought to go back in and look for them when he caught sight of two black dots far out. He waved and the sun flashed off their masks and after a while one of them waved back.
When they came ashore, he helped them with their tanks. Lohmeyer pulled his mask off and blew his nose. A red thread mingled with the mucus. “A little squeeze,” he said. He looked at Dan's leg. “You're bleeding, too.”
“Lost an argument with one of those rocks.”
Harper pulled the cooler off the truck. “Beer, anybody? Chips?”
The beer tasted great and so did the salty snacks. They stripped the rest of their gear off, then lay around and popped cans till Dan felt light-headed and detached. He forgot about the battle problem and the computers and Leighty and lay on the hot sand with his arm over his eyes and his mind as close to being turned off as it could get. Only the sand fleas kept him awake.
“Man,” said Harper, “this is great. Isn't this great? All we need is some cunt bitches and we'd be in hog heaven.”
“Did you see that manta?”
“You saw a manta ray, Gary?”
Lohmeyer fitted his glasses back onto a reddening nose. “On the way back in. I saw him from the side and I thought he was a shark.
Then he sort of canted over and I saw the wings. Jay tried to get close enough to shoot him, but he couldn't catch up.”
Harper was still talking about women. “Ever teach a fifteen-year-old to suck cock? San Juan, when I was a radioman … Hoss, I got somebody I want you to meet, we get back to Charleston. Little lady name of Mary.” He winked at Dan. “The lieutenant knows her
real
well.”
He felt annoyed. “Isn't there anything else you can talk about but pussy, Harper?”
“Oh sure. Gash and twat and cooze and poontang. And bearded clams, come holes, fur burgers, beavers, nooky, muff pie …” He went on for at least five minutes while Lohmeyer giggled in admiration. Dan gave the younger officer a disgusted look.
“So,” he said, hoping to change the subject, “you're really thinking about getting out?”
“Yeah. I've seen it all so many times, nothing's new anymore. And I need to put some time in on the bars.”
“I think you put too much time in at the bars.”
“I mean the ones I own. Need to show that forty-five to a couple people. Fuckers rip me off, I'll jam it up their assholes and pull the trigger.”
Dan looked sideways at Harper's weak-chinned profile. He'd put his glasses back on after the dive, and his bald patch was getting burned. Sometimes he couldn't figure the chief warrant. “You better cover your head,” Dan told him. “You're gonna burn.”

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