Beast (7 page)

But this pilot wasn’t idling, he was heading north into the vast nowhere, and with speed on too.

“I don’t know,” Darling said. “Unless he’s late for supper up in Nova Scotia, I’d say he’s on a mission with some clout to it.”

He turned into the wheelhouse and picked up the radio microphone.

“Huey One … Huey One … Huey One … this is Privateer … come back. …”

LIEUTENANT MARCUS SHARP had been shooting baskets that Friday—fantasizing himself in a mano a mano with Larry Bird—when the operations officer called him inside and said that a British Airways pilot on his way to Miami had picked up an emergency signal twenty miles north of Bermuda.

The pilot hadn’t seen anything, the ops officer said, which wasn’t surprising considering that he was traveling more than five hundred miles an hour more than six miles above the ocean, but the signal had been loud and clear on his VHF radio. Someone was in trouble down there.

The guys in the tower at the naval air station had checked with Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh/Durham, Baltimore and New York to see if any planes were overdue. Then ops had called Bermuda Harbour Radio and asked for any reports of vessels missing, overdue or in distress.

Everything seemed copacetic, but they couldn’t take a chance—they had to follow up on the signal.

Sharp had quickly showered and pulled on his flight suit, while the operations officer had rounded up a copilot and a rescue diver for him and made sure one of the helicopters was gassed up. Then he had scribbled down the coordinates reported in by the B.A. pilot, stuffed a chocolate bar and some gum into his pockets and trotted across the apron to the waiting chopper.

As he had lifted off from Kindley Field and banked around to the north, for the first time in weeks Marcus Sharp felt alive. His juices were flowing, his pulse was up, he was interested, he had a goal to focus on. Something was happening—not much, not exactly what he’d call action, but anything was better than the nothing that had become his routine.

Maybe, he thought as he corrected his course to the northwest, maybe they’d actually find someone in the water, someone in danger. Maybe they’d even have to accomplish something … for a change.

Sharp’s problem wasn’t only that he was bored. It was more complicated than that, worse than boredom: He had a weird, amorphous sense that he was dying, not physically but in other, less tangible, ways. He had always needed adventure, courted danger, thrived on— felt he could not survive without—change. And life had always provided nourishment enough.

The navy recruiter at Michigan State had recognized the need in Sharp for action and had played to it. Here was a kid who had broken both legs—one skiing, one hang-gliding—and yet had persisted in both sports; a certified scuba diver since the age of fourteen whose hero was not Jacques Cousteau but Peter Gimbel, the man who had made the first underwater films on great white sharks and the wreck of the Andrea Doria; a dreamer who wanted to build an ultralite airplane and fly it across the country; a restless quester whose ambition was to affirm himself not by accumulating wealth but by testing his own limits. On the navy’s psychological-profile test, he had listed three men he admired: Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Roosevelt and James Bond—all “because they were doers, not observers, they lived their lives.” (Sharp noted that, like him, the navy wasn’t persnickety about making distinctions between legend and reality.)

The recruiter persuaded Marcus that the navy offered him a chance to spend his career doing what others could hope to do only on occasional vacations. He could pick his specialty, change it regularly, “stretch his envelope” on the sea and in the sky and, in the process—almost incidentally—contribute to the nation’s defense.

He signed up before graduation and, in June of 1983, he entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island.

The first few years met all his expectations. He became expert in underwater demolition. He qualified as a helicopter pilot. He served a stint of sea duty and actually saw combat, in Panama. When his mind caught up with his body and he developed adult interests, he spent a year studying meteorology and oceanography on an exchange tour in Halifax.

Life for Sharp was rich, varied and fun.

But in the past year and a half, variety and fun had ceased to satisfy.

Part of his problem, he knew, was an unwillingness to confront the specter of becoming a grown-up. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t given much thought to thirty, certainly hadn’t been afraid of it, until a few months before, when he had been rejected in his application to join the navy’s elite, high-risk, high-demand amphibious guerrillas, the SEALs. He was too old.

But at the core of his discontent lay the only thing close to tragedy that Marcus Sharp had ever known.

He had fallen in love with a United Airlines flight attendant, a skier and scuba diver, and they had been all over the world together. They were young and immortal. Marriage was a possibility but not a necessity. They lived in and for the present.

And then one September day in 1989, they were snorkeling off a beach in North Queensland. They had heard routine warnings about dangerous animals, but they hadn’t been worried. They had been swimming with sharks and rays and barracudas; they could take care of themselves. The sea was a world not of danger but of adventure and discovery.

They had seen a turtle swimming by, and they had followed it, trying to keep up with it. The turtle had slowed and opened its mouth, as if to eat something, though they saw nothing, and they glided up to it, entranced by its grace and efficiency in the water.

Karen had reached out to touch it, to stroke its shell, and as Sharp watched she suddenly convulsed and arched her back and clawed at her breast. Her snorkel slipped from her mouth. Her eyes went wide and she screamed, tearing at her own flesh.

Sharp grabbed her and pulled her to the surface and tried to get her to speak, but all she could do was shriek.

By the time he got her to shore, she was dead.

The turtle had been feeding on sea wasps, box jellyfish all but invisible in the water, colonies of nematocysts so toxic that a brush with them could stop a human heart. And so it had.

When Karen had been buried in Indiana and Sharp’s grief had begun to scar over, he had found himself possessed by darker thoughts, thoughts of the randomness of fate. It wasn’t a matter of injustice or unfairness—he had never thought of life as fair or unfair; it simply was. But fate was capricious. They were not immortal; nothing was forever.

He had become plagued by the emptiness of his life, the lack of focus. He had done many things, but to no purpose.

He had an image of himself as a steel ball on a pinball machine, popping in and out of one hole after another, going nowhere.

The navy had given him the best billet available, a two-year tour in Bermuda—sunny, comfortable, undemanding and only two hours from the U.S. mainland. Quiet, however, was not what Sharp needed. He needed action, but now action alone wasn’t enough: There had to be a point, a purpose to it.

In Bermuda, he had found nothing much to do except shuffle papers and occasionally fly around in a helicopter and hope that someone needed rescuing.

From time to time, he thought of quitting the navy, but he had no idea what he would do. Civilian life had few slots for helicopter pilots expert in blowing up bridges.

Meanwhile, he volunteered for any task that would keep his mind off himself.

He was heading northwest now, intending to set a search pattern from the northwest to the north to the northeast and then the east, all on the north side of the island. He turned his UHF radio to 243.0 and his VHF to 121.5, the two frequencies over which emergency equipment broadcast. He flew at five hundred feet.

Six miles off the island, where the reefs ended and the water changed from dappled turquoise to deep cerulean, he heard a beep—very faint, very distant, but persistent. He looked at the copilot, tapped his earphones, and the copilot nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Sharp scanned his instruments, turning the helicopter slowly from side to side until he found the direction in which the beeping from his radio direction finder was loudest. He took a bearing from the compass.

Then a voice came over his marine radio.

“Huey One … Huey One … Huey One … this is Privateer … come back.”

“Privateer … Huey One …” Sharp smiled. “Hey, Whip … where you at?”

“Right underneath you, lad. Don’t you keep your eyes on the road?”

“Had my eyes on the future.”

“Going for an outing?”

“B.A. pilot picked up an EPIRB signal a while ago. You hear anything?”

“Not a peep. How far out?”

“Ten, fifteen miles. I’ve got it on one-twenty-one-five now. Whatever it is, northwest wind’s pushing it back this way.”

“Maybe I’ll chase your wake.”

Sharp hesitated, then said, “Okay, do that, Whip. Who knows? Might use your help.”

“Done and done, Marcus. Privateer standing by.”

Good, Sharp thought. If there was a boat sinking out there, Whip would arrive a lot faster than any vessel summoned from the base. If it was an abandoned boat, a lifeboat, say, SOP would call for him to put a diver down to investigate. The weather was decent, but putting a diver down from a helicopter in the open ocean under any conditions involved risk. He wouldn’t hesitate to go himself, but he didn’t relish putting a nineteen-year-old down into the sea all alone. Whip could check it out for him while he went in search of floaters. If they found people, alive or dead, he’d have to put the diver down, and he wanted the boy to be fresh.

Besides, maybe there’d be something worthwhile for Whip if nobody claimed it. A raft. A radio. A flare gun. Something worth selling or using, something to get Whip money or save him money. And Sharp knew Whip needed it.

Besides, Sharp thought, I owe him one.

One? Hell, he owed Whip Darling about a hundred.

Whip had saved Sharp’s sanity, at a time when there was a better-than-even chance of his becoming a blob, an addict of entertainments like Surf Nazis Must Die and Amazon Women on the Moon. His weekends had become unbearable. He had dived with every commercial tour group on the island, ridden a motorbike around every square inch of the place, visited every fort and museum, spent money in every saloon—he had no moral objection to becoming a drunk, but he had no tolerance for liquor and didn’t like the taste of it—and seen every movie in the base video store except those involving the ax murder of baby-sitters. He read for hours every day, till his eyes rebelled and his ass atrophied. He was on the brink of doing the unthinkable— taking up golf—when he met Whip at a base function.

He had listened, fascinated, to Whip’s discourse on the techniques of discovering shipwrecks and had asked enough intelligent questions to secure an invitation to come out on the boat some Sunday … which had quickly become every Sunday and most Saturdays. As he listened to Whip, he learned, and, curiously, he found himself becoming ashamed of his education. For, here was a man with six years’ schooling who had taught himself to be not just a fisherman and a diver but a historian and a biologist and a numismatist and… well, a walking encyclopedia of the sea.

Sharp had offered to contribute to the cost of Darling’s fuel and been turned down; he had offered to help paint the boat and been accepted, which pleased him because it made him feel like a participant instead of a parasite. Then Whip had shown him photographs of what old shipwrecks looked like from the air, and suddenly—as if a door had cracked open, lighting a corner of his mind he had not known was there—he saw the prospect of new interests, new goals.

Whip taught him not to look for the classic fairy-tale image of a shipwreck—the ship upright and ready on its keel, sails rigged, tricorn-hatted skeletons sitting where they died gambling over a stack of doubloons. The old ships had been wooden, and, for the most part, the ones that hit Bermuda sank in shallow water. Storm seas broke them to pieces, and centuries of moving water had dispersed them and pressed them into the bottom, and the bottom had absorbed them and corals grew on them, taking the dead to their bosoms.

There were three main telltales, Whip had said, to a shipwreck on the bottom. When a ship was driven over the reefs—flung by the wind, shoved by a following sea—it would crush the reef, kill the fragile corals and leave a scrub mark that, from a couple of hundred feet in the air, would look like a giant tire track.

A sharp eye might see a cannon or two, overgrown and coral-encrusted and looking like not much more than an unlikely mass in an unnaturally straight line. There was truth to the old saying that nature doesn’t like straight lines. But the presence of a cannon didn’t always mean the ship itself was nearby, because when a vessel was in its last throes, often the crew would heave everything heavy overboard to keep her from capsizing. It was possible to find a cannon here, an anchor there, and no ship at all if the sea had carried her miles away before slamming her down and busting her to bits in her last resting place.

What was a dead giveaway—visible from the air but most difficult to identify—was a ballast pile, for Whip insisted that where a ship dropped her ballast was where she had died. Yes, her deck might have drifted away, or her rigging, carrying a survivor or two, but her heart and soul—her cargo, her treasure—lay with her ballast. Usually, the old-timers ballasted with river rocks from the Thames or the Ebro or one of the other rivers near their home ports. The rocks were smooth and round and small enough for a man to lift. Think of cobblestones, Whip told Sharp, because all the cobblestones in places like Nantucket had been ballast stones, carried in the bowels of a ship to keep her upright on her way over from England, then replaced with barrels of oil for the journey home.

So what Sharp conditioned himself to look for was a gathering of very round stones all piled together, often in a white sand hole between dark coral heads, for Whip had taught him that an old ship would have struck the coral head and stuck there until another sea came along and broke her loose and cast her innards into the sand, which would embrace them and cover them over.