Island in the Sea of Time (2 page)

With a wry grin, he thought of a slogan someone had suggested to the Chamber of Commerce once as a joke:
We used to kill a lot of whales. Come to Nantucket!

The little police station was in a building that had once housed the fire department, and across a narrow road from a restaurant-cum-nightspot. The buildings on both sides were two stories of gray shingle with white trim, like virtually everything on the island that wasn’t red brick with white trim.
About time for supper
, he thought. No point in going home; he hadn’t gotten any better at serious cooking since Betty passed on five years ago. Better to step over and get a burger.

He sighed, stood, hitched at his gunbelt, and reached for his hat, looking around at the white-painted concrete blocks, the boxes of documents piled in corners and bursting out of their cardboard prisons.
Hell of a life.
And he’d had to let the belt out another notch recently; it seemed unfair, when the rest of him was the same lanky beanpole it’d been when he graduated from high school back around LBJ’s inauguration.

The lights flickered. Nantucket was just about to switch over to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators, though.

“Christ,” he said. “Not
another
power-out.”

He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he’d walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that brought him back to himself.

Nor’easter at twenty knots. Just what we needed
, Captain Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye and ear on the mast captains’ work as the royals and topgallants were doused and struck.

“Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!”

“Ease the royal sheets!”

The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: “Haul around on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!”

The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of a house.

“Lay them to aloft,” Alston said to the sailing master. “Sea furl.”

The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.

No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as this looks to be
. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or taken aback by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foulweather gear like cold damp fingers poking and prodding.

She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked behind her back by the ship’s triple wheel, a tall slim woman from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebonyblack, close-cropped wiry hair a little gray at the temples; her face was handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a heaving landscape of gray-black water streaked with foam, and the ship plunged across the wind with the yards sharp-braced. Her prow threw rooster tails every time the sharp cutwater plowed into a swell, twin spouts jetting up over the forecastle from the hawseholes where the anchor chains ran down through the deck. Then the ship would heave free as if shrugging her shoulders, water foaming across the forecastle deck and swirling out the scuppers.

Alston smiled behind the expressionless mask of her face.
Now this, this is real sailing
, she thought.

The Coast Guard training ship
Eagle
was a three-masted steel-hulled windjammer. It had been built in 1936, and the original incarnation was called the
Horst Wessel
before the United States took it as war reparations. There were still embarrassing swastikas buried under the layers of paint here and there, but it was sound engineering, solid work from Blohm & Voss, the firm that built the
Bismarck.
Three hundred feet from prow to stern, a hundred and fifty to the tops of the main and foremasts, eighteen hundred tons of splendid, lovely anachronism. Good for another fifty years hard sailing, if the Powers That Be didn’t decide to scrap her.

“Secure the forward lookout,” she said. It was getting a little dangerous for someone to perch up in the bows.

“Come about, ma’am?” the sailing master asked.

“In a minute or two, Mr. Hiller,” she said.

Nantucket was off to the northeast, fairly close, and it paid to be careful in the dark; the sea between the island and Hyannis on the mainland was shoal water, full of sandbars, and southeast was worse. She’d been tacking into the teeth of the wind for practice’s sake; fairly soon she’d turn and let the
Eagle
run southwestward. Cadets and crewpeople were swarming up the rigging; more stood by on deck, poised to haul on ropes. Archaic, but the best training for sea duty there was—the Coast Guard still taught stellar navigation, too, despite the fact that you could push a button on a GPS unit and get your exact location from the satellites. Lieutenant William Walker was taking a sight on Arcturus from the edge of the quarterdeck, and Victor Ortiz was running one of his pupils through the same procedure. Usually they did the first cruise of the season without cadets, but this year the Powers in their ineffable wisdom had changed the schedules a little. Completely rearranged them, in fact, causing everybody endless bother and inconvenience. It was a considerable relief to get out to sea, where a captain was her own master.

“The wind’s southing, ma’am,” Thomas Hiller, the sailing master, hinted.

“Brace them sharp, then.”

The centuries-old litany of repeated orders echoed across the deck;
Eagle
had been built to operate the old-fashioned way, no high-geared winches or powered haulage. It ended with a boatswain’s mate bellowing: “Ease starboard, haul port, lively port!”

“Heave!” shouted the line leader in a trained scream that cut through the moan of the wind.

“Ho!” chorused the twenty young men and women on the line, surging back in unison.

“Heave!”

“Ma’am.” Alston looked up. Hiller looked a little lost, which was a first. He’d been on the
Eagle
for eight years. “Ma’am . . . there’s something odd about the compass reading.”

An old-fashioned magnetic card compass binnacle stood before the wheels. She took a step and looked down into it; the card was
whirling
, spinning in complete circles. Captain Alston blinked in surprise. What on earth could cause that? The sky was clear to the horizon, only a little high cloud boiling in on the wind—unusually good weather for this time of year and these latitudes, although there might be a storm riding in on the nor’easter. No lightning, certainly. Then she noticed that the gyro repeater compass was quivering too.

Marian Alston had been in the Coast Guard much of her thirty-eight years, commanded the
Eagle
for four, and served on search-and-rescue craft and armed cutters before that; she’d joined up the year sea duty was opened to women. You learned to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.

“Finish up and get them down,” she said.

Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out, there would always be the odd officer cadet who froze a hundred and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.

A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing between the ship’s three wheels. Alston bit back a startled obscenity—you had to set an example—and shook her hand. Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the benchlike platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction. They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on the heading they’d been given.

Light flickered from left to right behind her, curving ahead of the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away—curving from east to west, in a line her navigator’s eye could see was the arc of a huge circle. St. Elmo’s fire ran along the
Eagle
’s rigging, blue witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead.
Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world,
ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then the noise on deck penetrated.

Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided. Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the rigging’s moaning song of cloven air died.

“Silence there!” she snapped, quiet but carrying. “Mr. Roysins, let’s get some order here. Whatever’s happening, panic won’t help.”

But it would feel so good,
part of her mind gibbered, looking up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.

“On with engines,” she said. Max the diesel hammered into life and steerageway came on the ship. “Strike all sails. Give me a depth-finder reading.”

She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. “We’ve got a ship to sail.”

 

“Got the stores covered?” Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed through the crowd on Main Street.

“Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry—just in case. We’re stretched pretty thin.”

His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named George Swain, and a fourth cousin.
Everyone
on the island was a cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers on the force.

“Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief.”

“Ayup. Don’t blame ‘em, George. Still, we’ve got a job to do.” He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of names in his head. “Get everyone who’s off-duty back on. And call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney. Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down to the station. Deputize ’em.”

George missed a step. “Chief, we can’t do that on our own say-so!”

“I can and I just did,” Cofflin said. “Ed’s a good man and he knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can talk some sense into these people here.” The selectmen or somebody should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they were probably out there running around with the rest of the crowd.

He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of the street. The lights on the cast-iron lampposts shone on a sea of faces, on a street that should be mostly clear this time of night. Overhead the ghastly, garish lights still crawled and sparked, adding a weird touch to the upturned faces: all it needed was torches and pitchforks to be something out of a movie. He raised a battery-powered megaphone to his lips.

“Now, let’s have some sense here,” he said.

“What the fuck’s going on?” someone yelled, and the crowd roared with him.

The bullhorn cut through the gathering madness, stopped it feeding on itself.

“If I knew what was going on, I’d tell you,” Cofflin said bluntly, in the silence that followed. “I can tell you going hog-wild won’t help any. That—” he pointed upward toward the shimmering dome of light—“hasn’t hurt anyone yet. But we’ve had a dozen accidents, a suicide, and two assaults-with-intent tonight. That
has
hurt people.”

It wasn’t real easy to have a riot in a town of four thousand people; particularly not when most of them were oldstock Yankees and phlegmatic by inclination and raising . . . but everyone was coming real close about now. He looked up. If he thought it’d do any
good
, he’d be inclined to start screaming himself. The dome of fire had been there all night, hanging over the town, over the whole island, like the face of an angry God. Every church on the island was jam-packed, but at least those people weren’t causing any harm and might be doing some good.

“The phone to the mainland’s out,” he went on. “Radio and TV are nothing but static; the airport can’t get through either. The last planes from Hyannis and Boston didn’t arrive. Now why don’t you all go home and get some sleep. If things aren’t back to normal in the morning, we’ll—”

A collective shout that was half gasp went up from the crowd. The stars were back. There was no transition this time; one minute the dome of lights was there, and the next it wasn’t. He suddenly realized that a sound had accompanied it, like very faint frying bacon, noticeable only when it was gone.