Secret sea; (17 page)

"She looks all right white," Mike said.

"Just like a sore thumb," Pete said. "Tomorrow we camouflage her."

"Skipper, if it wasn't for the chow, I'd mutiny," Mike said. "Here we are with gold all over the bottom of the ocean and what do we do? Do we go get some of it? No. We paint. We haul wood. We mess around."

Pete laughed. "Go mess around in the galley while I rig a sounding chain. And those last pancakes you cooked could have been used for collision mats."

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"Okay, horrible, you cook," Mike said.

"Suits me. You go forward and measure off exactly one hundred and five feet of anchor chain and flemish it down the starboard deck."

Mike turned toward the ladder. "How'd you say you liked your pancakes, Cap'n? Soft and fluffy or thin and soggy?"

"I just like plenty of 'em," Pete said, and went forward to the anchor chain.

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ihree days later a strange ship emerged from the lagoon. The Indra, bare of masts and bowsprit, of boom and gaff and gallows frame, looked unfinished and ashamed. She was like a car without wheels, an airplane without wings. Close up she also looked like the mixing vats of a paint factory.

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"A sailboat's got no business looking like this," Mike said sorrowfully.

"It hurts," Pete admitted. **But she'll give that radar a headache."

*'Maybe the radar can't find her but I don't know about all this paint. It seems to me that she'd be easier to spot this way than when she was plain white."

''Doesn't work that way, really," Pete said. "I saw battleships painted this way and you couldn't see 'em until you were right on top of them."

Pete had followed the Navy's camouflage system—breaking all the straight lines, fixing places where shadows would fall so that the shadows wouldn't shov/, making the painted patches and blobs appear to flow down into the water. All the shades were pale—thin greens and grays and browns.

"We'll find out," Mike said. "When Weber sails right by us in that black sloop, I'll give you six bottle caps."

"It's a deal."

On the high tide the Indra slipped out of the channel, and Pete turned her west.

"What do we do now?" Mike asked. "I bet you've got 'steen more things to do before we go after that gold. I'm beginning to believe you don't want to find it."

"Mike, me lad, calm yourself. And go forward.

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Let the anchor chain run out until that red rag tied in it is just clear of the hawsehole."

"That sounds more like treasure hunting," Mike said as he went forward. On the end of the anchor chain was a small grapnel and Mike dropped it and watched it foam down as the anchor chain rattled out of the chain locker. The red rag flashed by, and Mike snubbed the chain and then cranked it back in until the rag was at the hawsehole.

Back in the cockpit, Mike asked, "What happens now?"

"When we were testing that gimmick for BuShips, the water to the north of the Santa Ybel had a fairly uniform depth of a hundred and ten feet," Pete explained. "The grapnel is down to a hundred and five. We'll get as close to the position as we can with the radio compass and then work a square search until the grapnel hooks something. When' she does, we drop a buoy."

Mike looked at him. "You mean we leave a buoy out there with a sign on it, 'Here's the gold, Mr. Weber'?"

Pete grinned and pointed to an old, dried, brown, hard coconut lying in the stern. Mike picked it up. A lag screw with a ring in it had been screwed into the coconut. A snap hook attached to a reel of thin stainless-steel wire was snapped into the ring. On the other end of the

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wire there was a small folding anchor such as those used for anchoring small sailboats.

Mike laughed. **If I didn't know you so well, •Cap'n, I'd think you were a genius."

But Pete had put on the headphones and was plotting his position as the Lidra moved slowly ahead. Slowly, dot by dot, across the chart a line moved toward a red dot Pete had made. As he listened to the sounds coming from the earphones and slowly revolved the loop of the compass, Pete got tense. His mouth got dry and then his throat, and soon he could hear his heart beating so loud that it almost interfered with the compass signals. Pete licked his dry teeth, but when he made another dot, he noticed that his hand was trembling.

Then Mike said, his voice breaking, **Boy, this is worse than walking around a haunted house. Suppose we miss her, Pete?"

Pete didn't answer. The line was coming closer and closer. Once he looked up, looked forward at the calm, blue, soft water.

Then the line of the Indra's course sliced through the red dot. Pete picked up a packet of aviator's dye marker and threw it overboard. Slowly on the blue water a deep green dye began to spread.

^'That's where she's supposed to be," Pete said quietly. **Mike, go up and put your hand on the

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chain. Maybe she touched but the grapnel didn't catch anything. If you feel a contact, let out a whoop."

Mike ran forward and lay down on his stomach beside the hawsehole. Putting his hand on the up-and-down chain, he looked through the metal hole at the water.

After a while Pete took the headphones off. "Must have missed her," he called to Mike.

Standing on top of the wheelbox so he could see the green splotch of dye, Pete turned the htdra around and went back. As the bows of the ship slid into the green stain on the blue water, Pete held his breath.

Mike saw the water turn from blue to green and he gripped the chain hard, feeling for any tremor.

Pete let his breath out slowly as the green showed up astern. Mike relaxed his grip on the chain.

They went back and forth through the green dye until it faded and disappeared. The hanging chain touched nothing.

Pete called Mike aft. "We're getting haphazard and this is too big an ocean," Pete said quietly. "We'll run up another position line and then work out a sector search on definite courses. That way we'll at least know what water we've been through. You steer."

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"I hope she's still down there," Mike said.

Pete looked at him but said nothing.

It was well on into the afternoon before they finished the first sector. Both of them were tired, not only from the strain of steering to a hair's breadth on the compass but also from that of waiting for the grapnel to catch and slow them. They ate some lunch out of cans—ate in silence— and then went back to the dogged tracing of the sea. The clock in the companionway tinkled off the bells as the afternoon dragged on. It had been more than an hour since Mike had said, "We've been over this spot a dozen times. I recognize the waves."

Pete couldn't even grin. Ever since two o'clock he had been wondering if the marvelous sounding device on the PC had been as accurate as he had thought it was. As the Indra searched mile after square mile of sea, each area overlapping the position the detector had given him, Pete wondered. If the thing was not accurate, he and Mike might just as well go home, for they would never find the Santa Ybel by just dragging the ocean.

Time after time Pete checked his position with the radio compass. His head ached from straining to hear the signals, from trying to pick the absolute peak of the beat from each station.

For more than two hours neither he nor Mike had said a word. At the end of each run Pete would turn the ship, come back in on the new

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course, and settle down, his eyes glued to the compass while Mike lay in silence forward, first one hand, then the other gripping the chain.

The clock tinkled eight times. Pete, listening to the musical sound dying away, debated whether to stop at the end of the next run, drink some coffee, and then go on. After a while they could eat supper, drink some more coffee, and keep on searching until both of them were too tired to keep her on a compass course. It made no difference, Pete decided, whether it was day or night. For four centuries the Santa Ybel had been there, and the grapnel on the end of the chain was sightless and without feeling. They might as well search until the wake of the Indra stopped flowing out straight as a string, began to waver as fatigue got them.

And then, as though sharp steel fingers had. suddenly gripped him and held him motionless, Pete sat for an eternity of time, it seemed to him, without being able to move a muscle as Mike's voice beat into his ears.

"Back her down! Back her down! Back her! Back her."

Pete moved at last. He slammed the engine into reverse, shoved the throttle forward. Water churned and foamed up under the Indra's after overhang, and she slowly stopped going forward and began to swim backwards.

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"Stop her. Stop her!" Mike yelled.

Pete shoved her into forward gear, knocked the way off her, and then slipped the lever back into neutral. He slowed the racing engine and said, his voice much louder than necessary, "What is it?"

"She's hooked something. Still got it," Mike yelled back.

Pete grabbed the coconut and the reel of wire with the anchor on it and ran forward.

Stooping beside Mike, he felt the anchor chain, felt its resistance. Slowly, with infinite care, as though he were extending the sense of touch all the way down the chain, Pete began to pull upward on it.

He needn't have been so careful. The grapnel was into something solid and when he heaved on it he could feel only coral and barnacles crushing under the hooks of the grapnel.

As the Indra, anchored by the grapnel, slowly swung her bow into the gentle wind, Mike said, whispering, "Is it?"

"I don't know," Pete said. He went to the side of the ship and dropped the little anchor so that it plummeted down beside the chain to the grapnel. The steel wire payed out as Pete held the spool with a marlinespike through the center. The bright wire flashed and glittered as it snaked down into the water, and when at last it stopped

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feeding from the spool, Pete dropped the coconut and watched it bob and float away. It looked like all the rest of the thousands of dried coconuts floating around in the sea.

"If that isn't the Santa Ybel*' Mike said slowly, "it's going to ruin me, Pete."

"Me too. But we went all over this water in the PC, Mike. We searched the whole bottom around here and there was nothing except what I hope is the Santa Ybel, and, very near her, a German submarine two planes put the blast on."

"Well," Mike said, "tomorrow tells the tale."

"Tomorrow, my eye," Pete said. "Today. . .. Take these readings, mate."

Mike got a notebook and pencil. Pete, anticipation running wild inside him, forced himself to take slow, careful, accurate readings from the radio compass.

When he finished, he averaged them and wrote the two final bearings in big black letters on the bottom of the page of the notebook. Under them, also big and black, he wrote down the longitude and latitude the detector on the PC had given him.

Then Pete sat down in the cockpit and motioned for Mike to sit beside him. "Here are four sets of numbers, Mike," Pete said quietly. "Look at them—this is the latitude and longitude of the Santa Ybel, if she's down there. And these are the bearings from radio compass stations."

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"Okay, okay," Mike said impatiently, "so we know where she is. Let's go get some of that old folding stuff."

Pete shook his head. "No, Mike. Memorize these numbers first. Memorize 'em so you can't forget them no matter what happens."

"What for? Holy mackerel, Pete, let's get on with this business. We've been messing around with stuff like this for too long already."

"Memorize 'em, speedy," Pete said. "Because we may not be through with Weber yet."

Mike began repeating the numbers over and over. Finally he said, "Okay, I got 'em. Let's go!"

Pete tore the pages out of the notebook and crumpled them up with the chart. Then he took them below to the galley and burned them. When he came back, lugging the light diving suit and helmet, he said, "Now there's not a piece of writing that Weber can get his hands on that'll do him any good. If he ever finds us the only way he can get those numbers is to beat them out of us. And I don't think he can do it."

"He better not try. You going down now?" Mike asked.

Pete nodded as he began to get into the diving suit.

"You going free?" Mike asked.

Pete grinned as Mike lowered the helmet carefully down over his head. When the faceplate

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screwed around to the front, Pete shook his head, making a **no" with his Ups. Mike got the Hfe Hne with the telephone connection inside it and attached it to the helmet. As soon as he put the earphones on, Pete turned his throat mike on and said, **Cinch up the chest weights. They feel loose."

Mike obeyed and then Pete said quietly, **Okay, hoist away."

On the stern of the Indra a low stout hoist and short boom were rigged where the gallows frame had been. Mike attached the lift to the bridle around Pete and hoisted him up, swung him out over the stern, and lowered him slowly down into the water.

For a few moments Pete lay on his back, bobbing around in the water as he kept the air exhaust valve closed. During the long watches after the storm Pete and Mike had spent hours rehearsing and making dummy runs on the diving equipment. Mike had almost memorized the decompression time for length of time under at a hundred and ten feet. Pete was sure that Mike realized how important it was to watch the clock, the valves, the lines—every thing., Pete's life depended on it.