Beast (8 page)

Now Sharp never missed a chance to fly, and whenever he flew—whether supposedly to keep his hours up, or to train new pilots, or to test new equipment—he always kept an eye out for shipwrecks. He flew as low as possible, yawing back and forth to keep the sun’s rays at a cutting angle through the shallow seas, and if one of his crew ever asked what the hell he was doing, he would reply with something vague like, Putting her through her paces.

So far, he had found two ballast piles, two shipwrecks. One, Whip said, had been explored in the sixties. One was new. They’d go have a dig on it one of these days.

The beeping was loud and regular now, and Sharp could see something yellow sliding up and down the rolling seas. He pushed the collective-power-control lever down, and dropped the helicopter to a hundred feet.

It was a raft, small and empty and apparently undamaged. He circled it, careful to stay high enough so that the downdraft from his rotors didn’t start it spinning or capsize it off the top of a wave.

“Privateer … Huey One …”

“Yeah, Marcus …” came Whip’s voice.

“It’s a raft. Nobody aboard. Just a raft. Could’ve fallen off a boat. Some of those EPIRBs are salt-water activated.”

“Whyn’t you let me pick it up with my davit? I’ll cruise around, see if there’s any swimmers, then bring it to shore. Nobody has to get wet.”

“You got it. It’s three-four-oh from where you were. Should be here in an hour or so. Meantime, we’ll set a search grid and swing back and forth till fuel sends us home.”

“Roger that, Marcus.”

“False alarm, I guess. But the land of the free and the home of the brave is grateful to you anyway, Whip.”

“My pleasure. Privateer standing by… .”

“MAYBE THE DAY isn’t a dead loss after all,” Darling said as he climbed the ladder to the flying bridge.

“Why’s that?” Mike was stowing the last of the coiled wire leaders.

“Got us a chance to pick up a raft. If she’s a Switlik and nobody’s name’s on her, there’s a couple thousand, maybe more.”

“Somebody’ll claim it. They always do.”

“Probably … the way our luck’s been running.”

They raised the raft in less than an hour, and Darling made a slow circle around it, studying it like a specimen on a laboratory slide.

“Switlik,” he said, pleased.

“Looks brand-new off the shelf, like nobody was ever on it.”

“That, or they were rescued right quick.” Darling saw none of the normal signs that people had spent time in the raft: no dirt, no scuff marks from rubber shoes, no fish blood from anything they’d caught, no bits of clothing.

“Sharks got ‘em?” Mike said.

Darling shook his head. “Shark would’ve bit through the rubber, collapsed one of the cells, maybe burred it with his skin. You’d see it.”

“What, then?”

“Whale, maybe.” Darling kept circling as he pondered that possibility. Killer whales had been known to attack rafts, dinghies, even big boats. Nobody knew why, because they’d never gone on and attacked the people; there had never been a true case of an orca eating a human being. Perhaps they just got to playing with a raft and, like a kid who had grown too fast, they didn’t know their own strength.

Humpback whales had killed people, but always by accident. They had come up to rafts out of curiosity, to see what they were, and gotten underneath and given a flip with their tails, and people had been flung to death.

“No,” Darling said, dismissing the thought. “Everything would be upside down and akimbo.”

Mike said, “Could be she just slipped off the deck and fell in the ocean.”

“Then what turned on the EPIRB?” Darling pointed to the Styrofoam-cased beacon. “That’s not automatic. Somebody turned it on.”

“Maybe a ship picked the folks up and they forgot to turn it off.”

“And nobody bothered to report in to Bermuda?” Darling paused. “Gun to my head, I’d say their boat sank out from under ‘em, and they tossed the raft in the sea and jumped for it and missed and drowned themselves.”

Mike seemed to like that answer, so Darling didn’t articulate the hazy idea he had of another option. No point in stirring up bad thoughts in Mike. Besides, speculation was usually bullshit.

“Well, the good news is,” Darling said, “she’s a brand-spanking-new Switlik, worth enough to keep the wolves at bay for a little while.”

They snagged the raft with a grappling hook, fixed the rope to the block-and-tackle rig on the davit, turned on the winch and hauled it aboard.

Mike knelt down and poked around, opening the supply box in the bow, feeling under the rubber cells.

“Best turn off the EPIRB,” Darling said as he removed the hook and coiled the rope. “Don’t want a lot of pilots baffled by emergency signals when they should be caring for their hangovers.”

Mike flicked the switch on the beacon and pushed the antenna back inside. He stood up. “Nothing. Nothing missing, nothing wrong.”

“No.” But something was bothering Darling, and he continued to stare at the raft, comparing the inventory of what he saw to what he knew he should be seeing.

The oar. That was it. There wasn’t any. Every raft carried at least one oar, and this one had been meant to have oars; there were oarlocks. But no oar.

And then, as the boat shifted slightly, his eye was attracted to sunlight glinting off something on one of the rubber cells. He bent over and put his face close to the rubber. There were scratch marks, as if a knife had cut the rubber but hadn’t gone all the way through, and around each scratch mark, shining in the sun, was a patch of some kind of slime. He touched his fingers to the slime and raised them to his nose.

“What?” Mike said.

Darling hesitated, then decided to lie. “Sunburn oil. Poor buggers were worried about their tans.”

He had no idea what it was. It stank of ammonia.

Darling called Sharp on the radio and told him he had the raft and intended to keep searching, a bit farther to the north. A person in the water, alive or dead, had no sail area, so he or she wouldn’t have traveled nearly as far as the raft had—might, in fact, have moved in the opposite direction from the raft, depending on the current.

And so they drove north for an hour—ten miles, more or less—then turned south and began to zigzag from southwest to southeast. Mike stood on the bow, his eyes on the nearby surface and the few feet below it, while Darling scanned the distance from the flying bridge.

They had just turned eastward, away from the sun, when Mike called out, “There!” and pointed off the port side.

Twenty or thirty yards away, something big and glisteny was floating in a tangle of sargasso weed.

Darling slowed and turned toward it. As they closed on it, they saw that the thing, whatever it was, was not man-made. It bobbed slowly and had a wet sheen and quivered like Jell-O.

“What the hell is that?” said Mike.

“Looks like a six-foot jellyfish snarled itself in the weed.”

“Damn! Don’t want to run into him.”

Darling put the boat in neutral and watched from the flying bridge as the thing slid down the side. It was a huge clear jelly oblong, with a hole in the middle, and it appeared to have some sort of life, for it rotated as if to expose new parts of itself to the sunlight every few seconds.

Mike said, “No jellyfish I’ve ever seen.”

“No,” Darling agreed. “Beats me. Spawn of some kind, I guess.”

“Want to pick some up?”

“What for?”

“The aquarium?”

“No. They never asked me for spawn. If it is spawn, let’s let the critters live, whatever they are.”

Darling resumed his course to the southeast. By the time they reached the area where they had recovered the raft, they had found two seat cushions and a rubber fender.

“Wonder why Marcus didn’t see these,” Mike said as he brought the fender aboard. “It’s not like they were underwater.”

“A helicopter is a wonderful contraption, but you got to fly it real slow over open water or you overwhelm the scanners in the human eye.” Darling looked out over the water. There were no signs of life, present or past. “That’s it, then.”

He took a bearing on the dim hump in the distance called Bermuda, and headed for home.

By six o’clock, they had left the deep behind, the ocean swell had faded and the water’s color had changed from blued steel to dark green. From the flying bridge they could see sand holes on the bottom and dark patches of grass and coral.

“Who’s that?” Mike asked, pointing to a boat silhouetted against the lowering sun.

Darling shaded his eyes and looked at the boat, appraising the rake of the bow and the shape of the house and the size of the cockpit.

“Carl Frith,” he said.

“Hell’s he doing? Trolling?”

“In the shallows? Not bloody likely.”

They kept looking. They could see movement aboard the boat, which rolled as if it were taking on a weight and then rolled back as if releasing it.

“You don’t think … ?” Mike began. “Nah, he’s not that stupid.”

“Stupid? Maybe not,” Darling said as he turned toward the boat and pushed his throttle forward. “But how about greedy?”

Mike glanced over at Darling. There was a set to Whip’s jaw, a cold and squinty hardness to his eyes.

Carl Frith had been a trap fisherman, and one of the noisiest protesters when traps were outlawed. He was always bleating about freedom, independence and the rights of man, despite having received over $100,000 from his settlement with the government—enough for any man, Darling thought, enough to let him change over to line fishing or charter fishing or start another business altogether. But it was beginning to look as if Carl Frith wanted to have it both ways.

Because they were approaching from the northwest, upwind, they got to within a hundred yards of Frith before he heard Privateer’s engine. They had a clear view of him reaching underwater with his boat hook and snagging the sunken buoy, pulling the rope up to his winch, hauling the big fish trap aboard his boat, opening the door and emptying the catch into the fish hold.

“Miserable sonofabitch,” Darling said.

“Gonna run him down?”

“Gonna fillet the bastard.”

“Good enough.”

Darling felt a rage rising in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t care that what Frith was doing was illegal: As far as Darling was concerned, most laws were whores assigned to serve politicians. What burned him—outraged him, sickened him—was the mindless selfishness of the man, the headlong rush at destruction and waste. And it wasn’t only that Frith was still trap fishing, he was using submerged buoys so that the marine police wouldn’t see them on the surface. A passing boat might catch the buoy in its propeller and cut it away, or a storm might shift the trap so Frith couldn’t find it. Either way, the trap would be lost on the bottom, where day after day, week after week, it would kill and kill and kill.

Frith heard him coming now. He had a trap hung over the side, and as soon as he turned and saw Privateer bearing down on him, he pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt and cut the rope holding the trap, and the trap splashed into the water and sank away.

Darling kept up speed until he was ten yards from Frith’s small boat, and then he turned sharply and pulled back on the throttle, throwing a wake that slammed into Frith’s boat and staggered the man.

“Hey!” Frith shouted. “What you think you’re doin’?”

Darling let his boat wallow beside Frith’s. He leaned on the railing of the flying bridge and looked down. Frith was in his fifties, big-bellied and bald. His skin was as dark and worn as an old saddle, his teeth yellow from nicotine.

Darling said, “Just come by to see what you’re up to, Carl.”

“None of your concern.”

“Wouldn’t be fishing, would you?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Wouldn’t be trap fishing?”

“Piss off, Whip.”

“Let’s see, Carl…” Darling’s smile was icy. “I expect you’re getting mostly … what? … parrotfish and breams. Right?”

Frith said nothing.

Darling turned to Mike. “Have a look, Michael, see what he’s got.”

Mike started down the ladder from the flying bridge. Frith pulled his knife and held it up. “Nobody comes aboard my boat.”

From his perch on the ladder, Mike leaned over and looked down into Frith’s fish hold. Then he looked up at Darling and nodded.

Darling kept smiling and said, “Parrotfish and breams. Gonna cut ‘em up and sell ‘em to the hotels, right, Carl? Sell ‘em as fresh Bermuda fish? Get maybe a couple bucks a pound?”

“You can’t prove anything,” Frith said. He spread his arms and gestured at the empty cockpit. “Traps? Where do you see traps?”

“I don’t have to prove anything, Carl, I’m not gonna report you.”

“Oh.” Frith relaxed. “Well, then …”

Mike looked startled, but he kept quiet.

“You know what parrotfish and breams do, Carl? They eat the algae that grow on the corals, they clean the reefs. Without them, the coral suffocate and die.”

“Come on, Whip … one man, a few traps, don’t make—”

“Sure, Carl.” Darling let his smile fade. “One man who took a hundred thousand dollars from the government and gave his word he’d stop fishing, one man who doesn’t need the money but’s too pigheaded to do anything else, one man who doesn’t give a shit …”

“Hey, fuck you, Whip.”

“No, Carl,” Darling said. “Fuck you.” He spun his wheel to the right and leaned on his throttle, and Privateer jumped ahead and to the right, slamming into Frith’s boat, its steel bow shearing off Frith’s wooden swim step.

Frith screamed, “Hey! Goddam—”

Darling kept turning, his bow pushing Frith’s stern around. Frith ran forward and turned the key and pushed the button to start his engine. The engine coughed, protested, turned over.

Darling reversed his engine, backed around and aimed his bow at Frith’s stern. He struck Frith’s fantail, crushing it.

Then Frith was in gear, pulling away, trying to escape.

Mike climbed the ladder and stood beside Darling on the flying bridge. “Gonna sink him?”

“He’s gonna sink himself.” Darling looked back into the sun: It was still well above the horizon, still a brilliant yellow ball.

Frith fled, heading east. Darling stayed ten yards behind, threatening collision but not forcing it, heading Frith off whenever he tried to turn, pressing him ever eastward.