Cradle (34 page)

He shook his head and started to walk away. After a couple of steps, he turned around.
‘You can’t trust the pictures anyway,’ he said in more measured tones. ‘Underwater
photos always distort the objects….’

Troy was approaching with both the cart and Carol’s equipment. He could tell from
the body positions, even without hearing the words, that his two boatmates were at
it again. ‘My, my,’ he said as he walked up, ‘I can’t leave you two alone for a minute.
What are you fighting about this morning, Professor?’

‘This supposedly intelligent reporter friend of yours,’ Nick replied, looking at Carol
and speaking in a patronizing manner, ‘insists that our trident has changed shape.
Overnight I guess. Although she has not yet begun to explain how. Will you please,
since she won’t believe me, explain to her about the index of refraction or whatever
it is that fouls up underwater pictures.’

Carol appealed to Troy. ‘But it has changed. Honest. I remember clearly what it felt
like at first and now it feels different.’

Troy was unloading the cart and putting the ocean telescope system on the
Florida Queen
. ‘Angel,’ Troy said, stopping to check the trident that she was extending toward
him with both hands, ‘I can’t tell whether it has changed or not, but I can tell you
one thing. You were very excited when you found it the first time and you were also
underwater. With that combination I wouldn’t trust my own memory of how something
felt.’

Carol looked at the two men. She was going to pursue the discussion but Nick abruptly
changed the subject. ‘Did you know, Mr. Jefferson, that our client Miss Dawson has
requested your services as a diving partner today? She doesn’t want to dive with me.’
His tone was now acerbic.

Troy looked at Carol with surprise. ‘That’s real nice, angel,’ he said quietly, ‘but
Nick is really the expert. I’m just a little more than a beginner.’

‘I know that,’ Carol responded brusquely, still chafing from the outcome of the previous
conversation. ‘But I want to dive with someone I can trust. Someone who behaves responsibly.
I know enough about diving for both of us.’

Nick gave Carol an angry look and then turned and walked away. He was pissed. ‘Come
on, Jefferson,’ he said. ‘I’ve already agreed to let Miss High and Mighty have her
way.
This
time. Let’s get the boat ready and finish setting up that telescope thing of hers
again.’

‘My father finally divorced my mother when I was ten,’ Carol was saying to Troy. They
were sitting together in the deck chairs at the front of the boat. After they had
gone over the procedures for the dive a couple of times, Carol had mentioned something
about her first boating experience, a birthday on a fishing boat with her father when
she was six, and the two of them had moved comfortably into a discussion of their
childhood. ‘The breakup was awful.’ She handed the can of Coke back to Troy. ‘I think
you might have been luckier, in some ways, never to have known your father.’

‘I doubt it,’ Troy replied seriously. ‘From my earliest days, I resented the fact
that some of the kids had two parents. My brother Jamie tried to help, of course,
but there was only so much he could do. I purposely chose friends who had fathers
living at home.’ He laughed. ‘I remember one dark black kid named Willie Adams. His
dad was at home all right, but he was an embarrassment to the family. He was an older
man, nearing sixty at the time, and he didn’t work. He just sat on the front porch
in his rocking chair all day and drank beer.

‘Whenever I went over to Willie’s house to play, I would always find some excuse to
spend a little time on the porch sitting next to Mr. Adams. Willie would fidget uncomfortably,
unable to understand why I wanted to listen to his father tell his old, supposedly
boring stories. Mr. Adams had been in the Korean War and he loved to tell about his
friends and the battles and, particularly, the Korean women and what he called their
tricks.

‘Anyway, you could always tell when Mr. Adams was about to start one of his stories.
His eyes would begin to stare in front of him, as if he were looking intently at something
far off in the distance, and he would say, as much to himself as anybody, “Tell the
truth, Baby Ruth.” Then he would recite the story, almost as if he were quoting from
a written book, “We had driven the North Koreans back to the Yalu and our battalion
commander told us they were ready to surrender,” he would say. “We were feeling good,
talking about what we were all going to do when we got back to the States. But then
the great yellow horde poured out of China….”’

Troy stopped. He stared out at the ocean. It was easy for Carol to see him as a young
boy, sitting on a porch with his embarrassed friend Willie and listening to stories
told by a man who lived hopelessly in the past but who, nevertheless, represented
the father that Troy had never had. She leaned over to Troy and touched his forearm.
‘It makes a pretty picture,’ she said. ‘You probably never knew how happy you made
that man by listening to his stories.’

Around on the other side of the canopy, Nick Williams was sitting by himself in another
deck chair. He was reading
Madame Bovary
and trying without success to ignore both his residual hangover and the scattered
tidbits of conversation he was overhearing. He had programmed the navigation system
to return automatically to the dive site from Thursday, so there was nothing else
he really needed to do to pilot the boat. Nick almost certainly would have enjoyed
sharing the conversation with Carol and Troy, but after his earlier confrontation
with her, in which he felt she had made it clear that she didn’t want to associate
with him, he was not about to join them. It was now necessary that he ignore her.
Otherwise she would conclude that he was just another wimp.

And besides, he liked his book. He was reading the part where Emma Bovary gives herself
over completely to the affair with Rudolph Boulanger. Nick could see Emma sneaking
away from her house in the small French provincial village and racing across the fields
into the arms of her lover. Most of the time in the past, whenever Nick had read a
novel about a beautiful, dark heroine, he had pictured Monique. But interestingly
enough, the Emma Bovary that he was envisioning while he was reading on the boat was
Carol Dawson. And more than once that morning, when Nick had read Flaubert’s descriptions
of the passions of Emma and Rudolph, he had imagined himself in the role of the bachelor
from the French landed gentry making love to Emma/Carol.

The automatic navigation system that guided the boat while Nick was reading consisted
of a simple transmitter/receiver combination and a small miniprocessor. Taking advantage
of a worldwide set of synchronous satellites, software in the processor established
the boat’s location very precisely and then followed a preprogrammed steering algorithm
to the desired final site. Along the way, the two-way link with the satellite overhead
provided the necessary information to update the path through the ocean.

When the
Florida Queen
was within a mile of the dive site, the nav system sounded a tone. Nick then went
to the controls and changed to manual guidance. Carol and Troy rose from their chairs.
‘Remember,’ she said, ‘the primary purpose of our dive is to photograph and salvage
whatever it was that we saw down in that fissure on Thursday. If we have enough time
afterward, we will go back to the overhang where we found the trident.’

Carol walked over and switched on the monitor attached to the ocean telescope. She
was standing only a few feet away from Nick. They had not exchanged any words since
right after the boat left Key West. ‘Good luck,’ he said quietly.

She looked at him to see whether he was serious or was being sarcastic She couldn’t
tell. ‘Thank you,’ she said evenly.

Troy joined Carol at the monitor. She pulled the photographs out of the envelope so
they could be used to define the exact spot to anchor. For a couple of minutes she
issued instructions to Nick, based on what she was seeing from the telescope, commanding
small corrections to the boat’s position. At last the ocean floor underneath them
looked almost exactly as it had on Thursday when they had seen the whales. With one
major difference.

Now where’s that hole in the reef?’ Troy said innocently. ‘I don’t seem to be able
to find it on the monitor.’

Carol’s heart was speeding as she glanced back and forth from the telescope screen
to the photographs.
Where is that fissure?
she thought,
It can’t have disappeared
. The boat drifted away from the dive site and Nick steered it back. This time Troy
dropped the anchor overboard. But Carol still could not see any sign of the fissure.
She could not understand it.

‘Nick,’ she said finally, ‘could you give us a hand? We were down there together and
we both saw the hole. Are Troy and I just confused in some way?’

Nick came over from the steering wheel under the canopy and stared into the monitor.
He too was puzzled. But he thought he saw other things on the bottom of the ocean
that also looked a little different. ‘I don’t see the hole either,’ he said, ‘but
maybe it’s just the lighting. We were here in the afternoon last time and now it’s
ten in the morning.’

Troy turned to Carol. ‘Maybe Nick ought to dive with you. He was there before, has
seen the fissure, and knows how to find the overhang. Everything I know is from the
pictures.’

‘No,’ said Carol quickly. ‘I want to dive with you. Nick’s probably right. We just
can’t see the fissure because of the different lighting.’ She picked up her underwater
camera and walked around the canopy toward the back of the boat. ‘Let’s get going,’
she said. ‘We’ll do just fine.’

Troy gave Nick a silent shrug, as if to say ‘I tried,’ and followed her a few moments
later.

‘But Richard,’ Ramirez said, ‘we could get into big trouble.’

‘I don’t see how,’ Lieutenant Todd replied. ‘Or why anybody ever has to know. The
Navy built the system, after all, primarily for its own ships. We just allow everyone
else to use it. All we have to do is interrogate the master register and get the Doppler
and ranging time history for their particular identification code. Then we can figure
out where they are. It’s easy. We do it all the time for our own vessels.’

‘But we signed a maritime convention restricting our access to the private registers
except in life-or-death or national security cases,’ Ramirez continued. ‘I can’t just
tap into the satellite files because you and I suspect a certain boat of being on
an illegal mission. We need more authority.’

‘Look, Roberto,’ Todd argued vehemently, ‘who do you think is going to give us permission?
We don’t have the photographs. We only have your word for it. No. We must act on our
own. If we’re wrong, then nobody ever has to know about it. If we’re right, we’ll
nail that bastard, we’ll both be heroes, and nobody will give us a hard time about
what we’ve done.’

Ramirez was silent for a few seconds. ‘Don’t you at least think we should inform Commander
Winters? He is, after all, the officer in charge of this Panther investigation.’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Lieutenant Todd quickly. ‘You heard him at the meeting yesterday.
He thinks we’re out of line already. He’d like nothing better than to shit all over
us. He’s jealous.’ Todd saw that Ramirez was still undecided. ‘I’ll tell you what,’
he said, ‘we’ll call him
after
we find out where the vessel is.’

Lieutenant Ramirez shook his head. ‘That won’t make any difference. We still will
have exceeded our authority.’

‘Shit,’ said Todd in exasperation. ‘Tell me what has to be done and I’ll do it. Without
you. I’ll take all the risk.’ He stopped and looked directly at Ramirez. ‘I can’t
fucking understand it. I guess you Mexicans really are gutless. You’re the one who
actually saw the missile in the photograph, but….’

Ramirez’s eyes narrowed. His voice became hard. ‘That’s enough, Todd. We’ll get the
data. But if this turns out to be a disaster, I will personally break your neck with
my own hands.’

‘I knew you’d see it my way,’ Lieutenant Todd replied, smiling as he followed Ramirez
to a command console.

Commander Winters put the extra six-pack of Coke on the top of the ice and then closed
the cooler. ‘Anything else,’ he shouted from the door at his wife and son, ‘before
I haul this thing out to the car?’

‘No, sir,’ was the reply from the driveway. The commander picked up the cooler and
carried it through the screen door. ‘Whew,’ he said, as he loaded it in the open trunk
of the car, ‘you have enough food and drink in here for a dozen people.’

‘I wish you were coming, sir,’ said Hap. ‘Most of the rest of the fathers will be
there.’

‘I know. I know,’ answered Winters. ‘But your mother’s going. And I need to do some
private rehearsing for tonight.’ He gave his son a brief hug. ‘Besides, Hap, we’ve
talked about this before. Lately I haven’t felt comfortable at organized church activities.
I believe that religion is between God and the individual.’

‘You haven’t always felt that way,’ Betty interjected from the other side of the car.
‘In fact, you used to love church picnics. You’d play softball and swim and we would
laugh all evening.’ There was just a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘Come on, Hap,’
she said after a momentary pause. ‘We don’t want to be late. Thank your father for
helping us pack.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’ Hap climbed into the car and Winters closed the door behind him. They
waved to each other as the Pontiac backed out of the driveway into the street. As
they drove away, Winters mused to himself,
I must spend more time with him. He needs me now. If I don’t it will soon be too late
.

He turned around and walked back into the house. At the refrigerator he stopped and
opened the door. He poured himself a glass of orange juice. While he was drinking
it, he looked idly around the kitchen. Already Betty had cleaned up the breakfast
dishes and put them in the dishwasher. The counters were scrubbed. The morning paper
was neatly folded on the breakfast table. The kitchen was tidy, orderly. Like his
wife. She abhorred messes of all kinds. Winters remembered one morning, back when
Hap was still in nappies and they were living in Norfolk, Virginia. The little boy
had been exuberantly pounding the kitchen table and suddenly his arms had flailed
out, knocking Betty’s cup of coffee and the cream jug on to the floor. They both broke
and made quite a mess all over the kitchen. Betty had stopped her meal abruptly. By
the time she had returned to her cold scrambled eggs, there was not the slightest
indication anywhere, not on the floors, the lower cupboard, or even in the wastebasket
(she packed all the broken pieces neatly in the basket liner and then removed the
entire bag to the outside cans), that there had been an accident.