Devour (9 page)

In his fifty-plus years on the sea, Moore had never seen anything like the disruptions caused by the Kaala. Even the bitter North Sea or the East Indies, violent waters that did not suffer mistakes, were more predictable than this slop. Seas moved, yes, sometimes at deflecting angles to the weather patterns. All sailors knew this; the world above and the world below were just that, two different worlds. A tropical storm could be a fearsome presence, great cumulonimbus clouds stocked with enough energy to blow the all navies of the worlds to smithereens. Yet below the surface the tiniest fish floated along impervious to the energies above the surface. Likewise, the tides and currents and upwellings in the ocean decimated entire marine habitats or regions, while leaving those above unaffected by, and usually ignorant of, the changes below.

The Kaala was an exaggeration of these contrasts, a great ribbon of icy water flowing south against the warmer Gulf Stream. Already today the
Nokomis
had to endure two rogue waves, the latter a true monster, thirty feet tall if it was an inch. They had seen the wave on the radar in plenty of time, because NOAA was spitting out marine advisories left and right, and Moore had dedicated one of his junior officer to full-time radar watch. He took the wheel himself as the wave closed in on them, shutting off the autopilot and steering the
Nokomis
into the swell so they took it at a quartering angle. He warned the crew and passengers beforehand, and when they rode up the wave the bridge was quiet, almost churchlike. The
Nokomis
crested the massive wave and he powered up, his insides tingling as they tipped downward, and then there was the thrill of the descent, and he was in full control of the ship as the rogue wave lurched past them and was lost into the fog-shrouded world. Then there was cheering from the sheep below, and for a moment, Captain Donald Moore felt like a sailor again.

Now he glanced back into the bridge. He could see the radar through the glass, and the seas were clear. The GPS indicated they were twenty-seven miles out from the Massachusetts coastline, past the Stellwagen Bank. Sonar showed the floor of the ocean as a series of smooth humps, more than a hundred fathoms below them.

Too far out.

It was that prick Giuliani’s fault, forcing the casino boats to go three miles out, minimum, before the gambling could begin. In the past year the local and state politicians, enthralled by the money flowing in from the land-based casinos, had taken it a step further and banned ship-based gambling inside the Line. The fuel bill for the big Allis Chalmers diesels was murderous even with a three-mile run—at twelve miles out, they had seen a steady decline in profits. Well, the offshore gambling industry was on a long downslide, a fact reflected in his paltry captain’s pay . . . which was still more than he could make doing anything else.

He did not know his employers at Sefelis Industries. He was well aware of the rumors; Sefelis was mobbed up, and that the
Nokomis
and its gambling losses were a front. Moore did not particularly care if it was true. He suspected that, at the very least, Sefelis was not the most principled player in the marine entertainment world. That they had hired him, an unofficially blacklisted captain who had not piloted a ship for eight long years, loomed large in this suspicion.

None of that mattered now. He was back on the sea, and the
Nokomis
was a decent ship with a legitimate purpose. His tenure with Sefelis had gone smoothly for fourteen months—a paycheck every two weeks, a crew of officers who were competent if not stellar. And sometimes his unseen employers actually heeded his e-mails and provided what was needed to maintain, if not upgrade, the ship.

Then the phone had rung on a dreary Tuesday afternoon, a loud klaxon in the small office he maintained near the marina. He jumped, choking on his cigar smoke; the phone had been silent for weeks. When Moore answered, the voice on the other end asked him to meet for dinner to discuss a business proposition. When Moore told the caller he needed to contact the Sefelis business manager, the caller just chuckled.

“No,” Frankie Rollins said. “I don’t think we want to discuss this with your employers. Best you and I meet in private. Maybe over a glass of brandy? You prefer Matador, if I’m not mistaken.”

It wasn’t just the name of the brandy. There was something in the man’s laugh, the confidence in it that caused a cold sweat to break out on Moore’s brow. The cold sweat continued, on and off, for the next few hours. By the time he met Rollins at the
Troquet
later that night and looked through the documents the hairy little weasel handed him, the sweats dried up.

“I don’t have any money,” he said.

“I know,” Frankie said, then took a long drink of his cabernet. “You think I don’t know that? I’ve looked at your finances. You ever hear of a prenup, Captain? Jesus.”

Moore did not answer. His seared Muscovy duck breast, served with fresh morels and wild leeks, was untouched in front of him. He was thinking there could only be one other explanation if it was not blackmail.

“Which one of them did you know?”

Thinking of the names in the papers.
Gervais. McConnelly. Peterson. Rukavina. Pendleton.
Names he thought of each night as he lay in bed, names that burrowed through his brain. The faces, never in focus to begin with, faded with each year until only the names remained, wiggling through his brain, no less damning than a verdict read from a jury.

Frankie frowned, then laughed. “Those assholes that drowned?” he said. “I didn’t know any of them. Never really hung out with the cruise ship crowd, Donald. I want something a lot more simple.”

What he wanted was a venue for a game, a standard poker game with what Frankie called
somewhat unusual
stakes. A game set up between two powerful men, a game that required a location where both players could have peace of mind. A place where Frankie did not have to worry about outside interferences, about eavesdropping, about the local cops who had taken something of an interest in his goings-on in the greater Boston area. If possible, a venue where the United States might not have complete jurisdiction should the
somewhat unusual
game encounter difficulties.

Moore left the restaurant almost relieved. The nagging worry he had entertained for years had finally manifested itself, but what Frankie requested was not terribly difficult. Sefelis Corporation took little interest in his routes, and despite past transgressions, he was still a good sailor. If need be, he would take the
Nokomis
to Ireland’s western shores to keep his past silent.

So here they were, well past the Line, immersed in a sodden, foggy world filled with shifting currents and waves that sprang out of the ocean like enormous blind Furies. The water was so cold he had told his radar man to watch for icebergs on the graph. Bergs were almost unheard of this far south in summer, typically occurring off the Newfoundland coast, but he didn’t trust the International Ice Patrol to catch every iceberg that floated south, not with this current acting as midwife between the Arctic sea and the Atlantic.

Yet he was not overly worried. The other ships that had wrecked in the past weeks were much smaller craft, their radar arches not nearly as high as those of the
Nokomis
. A tall radar perch meant they could see the rogue waves miles off, and the powerful Allis Chalmers engines allowed them to position the
Nokomis
so the huge waves couldn’t swamp them. The shifting currents made navigation more difficult, yes, and the clash of warm and cold waters kept the air filled with fog. But they were the standard problems.

No, he thought, there was nothing much out here to be worried about.

He turned to go to bed, sparing one final glance over the seas. The fog had lifted as the night cooled, and he could now see all the way back down along the side of the ship. The waves curled and splashed, rocking the ship. Above them, he could make out the faint glow of the full moon through the thinning fog banks, its reflection just barely grazing the tops of the waves.

Moore squinted, screwed his fists into his eyes, and stared into the black ocean. For a moment, he thought he had seen something off the flank of the
Nokomis
, a massive shape cutting just above the surface like a wide-hulled submarine. When he looked again, the seas were empty.

Nothing, he thought. An illusion.

He knew fog was a great catalyst for creating optical tricks on the open sea. Once, on a severely hungover morning off the Vancouver coast, he had altered the course of the cruise ship
Veritas
to avoid running into an armada of World War II–era battleships. The armada had turned out to be nothing more than a set of low clouds, scudding just above the horizon, curled into iron destroyers by the morning sun and his own brandy-soaked brain.

He was about to laugh at himself when he saw the shape again. Closer this time, cutting though the waves cast by the ship’s props. Seventy-five meters back, the faint moon glow just bright enough that he could see the surface was not smooth, like a submarine would be, but rough, absorbing the meager light rather than reflecting it. And it did not move in a straight line, but with a slight side-to-side gyration. It rose above the water’s surface in three locations, front, a thick middle, and another, thinner spot, far behind the first two.

He spun back to the bridge and pounded on the glass. Collins looked up, startled, and rushed over to open the sliding window. “Captain?”

“Kill the running lights,” Moore said. “And hand me my binoculars. Quickly.”

He took the binoculars from Collins through the sliding window, ignoring his officer’s quizzical look, and walked back to the railing. The shape was still there, keeping pace with the ship. Whatever this was, it needed to be identified, perhaps reported. Then he remembered Frankie’s conditions, the mandate that there be no contact with the outside world. Well, it would still need to be reported. Eventually.

The banks of lights on the ship went out in three separate events as Collins flipped the switches. By the time Moore’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, he had lost sight of the shape. He closed his eyes, filtering out the moonlight through his eyelids. When he opened his eyes again the shape was there, appearing in the darkness like one of those children’s illusionary pictures. It was closer yet, the front of it only fifty meters off the starboard corner. Enormous, whatever it was. At least the same size as the giant whales, the big blues and the North Atlantic rights, but this was no whale. It did not move the same as the whales, did not have the same uniformly rounded back.

The Russians
, his mind whispered. Twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War and his mind would not give up the threat. Could the Russians have deployed a unique submarine that . . . what?

Trailed a casino boat in the middle of the Atlantic?

He swept the ocean surface with his binoculars, found the dark blotch, and adjusted the focus. As he did the shape slid beneath the moon-tinged waves. Before it sank into the ocean Moore thought he saw two pale orbs reflecting a soft green in the moonlight.

He lowered the binoculars and waited for the shape to materialize again. Turn the ship’s lights back on, perhaps? No, whatever it was, animal or machine, it seemed to be less shy in the dark. Whatever it might be, it was something he had never seen before in all his years at sea. He needed a witness. His own accounts of events that happened at sea had been called into question in the past, sometimes with very good reason. But now he was dry, lucid, and he wanted someone to verify what he was seeing. Cut the damn naysayers off at the pass.

He ran back to the window and shouted at Collins to come out. His first mate checked the
Nokomis
controls, then moved quickly to join Moore on the deck. His face was impassive. “Captain?”

“Watch,” Moore said, pointing down the side of the boat.

“For what?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Moore said. “Just off the starboard side. Right at the waterline.”

Collins peered dutifully into the ocean. He was thirty-five, perhaps forty, with eyesight that would be better than Moore’s. Moore wondered if he should get the digital camera from the bridge. No, it was too dark. Even with the flash, all the photo would show was the black ocean, perhaps the long flank of the ship.

“I don’t see anything, Captain.”

“Keep looking,” Moore said. They waited, listening to the big ship cut through the waves. The ocean remained empty. Perhaps whatever it was could not keep up with the ship. “What’s our current speed?”

“Six knots,” Collins said.

“Stay here,” Moore said. “I’m going to drop her off a bit.”

He ran back to the bridge, his heart thumping. The thrill of the unknown. It was the driver behind his obsession with the sea, his obsession with different seas, different ports. Different women. And when it felt as if he had seen what there was to see, when he had discovered Ecclesiastes was right—there was nothing new under this sun—he had turned inward. Had given up on finding enlightenment through the world and turned not to God, as Ecclesiastes suggested, but to booze. Which he had liked all along but found himself in a love affair with as he reached his early fifties.

And then, perhaps inevitably, the cruise ship. The typhoon, the marine advisories. His own drunken stubbornness to acknowledge them, although none knew he was drunk, not then and almost never. The reef crawling up out of the bottom of the ocean on the sonar screen, the depth alarm klaxons waking him from the half-slumber he was in.

He dropped the
Nokomis
’s throttle back until the GPS plotter showed they were at four knots. A bit slower than he would have liked in these seas, but it would only be for a moment. He punched the MARK button on the plotter, and their coordinates popped up on the screen. The cursor was blinking on the chart plotter screen, waiting for a label.