White Shark (15 page)

Buck, though, wasn't mellow; he was damn
well excited, this could be the biggest day of his life.
 
So instead of saying anything snappy to Brian
he just asked him nicely to please sit on the padded box amidships so it
wouldn't bounce around, and then he rammed his throttle forward.
 
There were sailboats thick as flies
everywhere in the harbor, and dinghies threading their way among them —
people
who'd come all the way from down-east Maine and the Jersey shore to watch all
the half-assed Blessing folderol — but Buck didn't give a damn.
 
If there was a marine cop around, let him try
to catch them.
 
There wasn't much afloat
that could catch the
Zippo
.
 
Buck had taken a stock Mako hull and modified
the bejesus out of it, then added a turbocharged power plant that could
generate four hundred and fifty horses and make the hull get up and
go
.

He cleared Waterboro Point going about thirty, pulled back so as not to
jar his precious box while he crossed the wakes of the big boats going in and
out of the Watch Hill channel, then hammered the throttle again and kicked in
the turbo, heading for Napatree with his speedometer quivering around sixty.

If everything went well with the tests today and the meeting tomorrow, by
midweek he could be adding a whole bunch of zeroes to his prospects, and he'd
be able to tell the folks at Waterboro Lumber to find some other sap to peddle
plywood and paint to yuppies.
 
If Brian
wanted to come along on the gravy train, he'd let him — all corporations had
dim-witted brothers on the payroll — though if he had to put money on it, he'd
bet Brian would choose to stay out there making change at the gas station on
the turnpike.

There was no swell rolling in, so Buck kept speed up as he swung around
Napatree and headed southeast, aiming for the space between the two humps that
were
Block Island
and Osprey.

"Where we goin’?
"
Brian shouted over
the shriek of the engine.

"To the
Helen
J.
"

"Long ways."

"Got a better idea?"

"Nope," Brian said, leaning toward the cooler.
 
"Think I'll have me a foamie."

"Later, Brian.
 
We got head work to do."

"Well, hell, Bucky..."
 
Brian sat back.

Brian was right, the wreck of the old schooner
Helen J
was a long way away, but it was the only wreck around decent
enough for videotaping.
 
It was shallow,
so the light would be good, and it was relatively intact, so it looked
good.
 
Buck needed a nice set for the
demo movie he was going to make to show the honchos from
Oregon
.
 
Sure, he could run the tests in a swimming pool somewhere, but it
wouldn't look like much, certainly not enough to impress hi-techies with fat
checkbooks.
 
Presentation was everything,
details counted, and if Buck Bellamy was anything, he was a details man.

"Look here," Brian said, pointing off to starboard.

Buck looked, and saw a big yellow buoy with lettering on it.
 
"So?
 
A buoy."

"Never seen a buoy like that.
 
Wonder what's under it."

"Got no time to look, Brian.
 
We lost a lot of time."

"Could be a boat," Brian said thoughtfully.
 
"Storm last week, maybe somebody lost a
boat, buoyed it for the barge to find... could make pretty pictures."

'Fat chance," Buck said, but as he passed the buoy, he thought:
 
Why not
have a look
?
 
Give it five minutes, and if it is a boat, a
newly sunk boat, those five minutes could save me two hours.
 
He throttled back and swung the boat in a
tight circle.
 
"Good idea," he
said.
 
"You're thinking,
Brian."

Brian beamed.
 
"I can, Bucky,
when I put my mind to it."
 
He
leaned over the bow and grabbed the buoy and brought it aboard, straining at
the weight of the coil of wire.

"Power wire," said Buck.

"What's the ‘O.I.’ mean?"

"Who cares?
 
There's
some
thing down there.
 
Put a tank on and have a look while I set up
the gear."

"Right, I'll have a look."

"But just a look, Brian.
 
Down and up, that's it.
 
I don't want you sucking up a bottle of air
dicking around on some lobster trap."

Brian nodded.
 
"A
bounce dive.
 
I like bounce
dives."

"And you're good at ‘em, too," Buck said.
 
Maybe compliments would accomplish what reprimands
couldn't.

"Damn right."
 
Brian put
the tank harness on over his T-shirt and buckled the belt to which he always
kept ten pounds of lead weights attached.
 
He picked up a sheath knife and began to strap it to his calf.

"Think some monster's gonna eat you?
"
Buck
said, smiling.

"You never know, Bucky, and that's a fact."
 
Brian slipped a pair of flippers on, spat in
his face mask and rinsed it overboard.
 
Then he sat on the side of the boat, fit the mask over his face, put his
mouthpiece in and flung himself into the water.

Buck watched until Brian had cleared his mask and, with a burst of
bubbles, begun to recede downward into the gray-green gloom.
 
Then he opened the padded box nestled before
the console.

There were two full-face masks in Styrofoam beds inside the box.
 
Each resembled half of the helmet of a space
suit, and contained an air regulator apparatus, a microphone and an
earphone.
 
On the back of each mask,
secured by straps, was a small rubber-covered box about the size of a cigarette
pack.
 
It was this box that represented
Buck's future.

What Buck had invented was an inexpensive, compact, self-contained
underwater communications system.
 
His
was not the first device to allow divers to talk to one another underwater — he
had no illusions about that — but all the existing systems had two major
drawbacks:
 
conversations had to be
relayed through a receiver-transmitter on a boat or platform on the surface,
and they cost several thousand dollars, which limited their use to commercial
or scientific professionals.
 
With Buck's
system, two or three (or five or ten) divers could talk directly to one
another, just like on a telephone conference call, and the devices could be
manufactured for less than two hundred dollars apiece.
 
The average sport diver spent well over a
thousand dollars on equipment, so a couple of hundred more — especially for
something exotic, glamorous and potentially lifesaving — amounted to nickels.

Buck had run the numbers so many times that by now they were burned into
his memory:
 
there were said to be about
four million divers in the
U.S.
alone; if his system was mass-produced, its unit cost could be halved; add
another fifty bucks for distribution and advertising.
 
If he went with an aggressive company that
marked each unit up 200 percent, and if they sold units to a quarter of the
divers in the
U.S.
,
and if he took a 10 percent gross royalty, he could be looking at thirty
million dollars.

And all thanks to a chance discovery... no, that wasn't true, he didn't
believe in chance, not after ten years of tinkering with video and sound
systems in his father's garage.
 
Anyway,
it was all thanks to discovering a new combination of wires and transistors and
relays.

Now all he had to do was make a decent three-minute video for the guys who
were flying in from Oregon, with high-fidelity sound of him and Brian talking
crystal-clear across fifty or a hundred feet of open water.
 
And if the guys still weren't convinced, why,
he'd bring them out here and let them try it themselves.
 
That was another beautiful thing:
 
the system was so simple it could be used by
anybody.
 
Even his
brother.

"Bucky!"
 
Brian burst
from the water and grabbed the low bulwark on the stern of the boat.
 
"There's a coffin down there!"

It took a moment for Brian's words to sink in.
 
Then Buck said, "Bullshit, Brian...
 
come
on..."

"I swear!
 
Either
that or a treasure chest.
 
You
gotta come see it."

"Brian... we been diving out here a thousand times.
 
There's fishing boats, car wrecks, a two
barge, a bunch of barrels and the
Helen J
.
 
There's no fuckin’ coffin!
 
There's no treasure chest.
 
Besides, you wouldn't know a treasure chest
if it up and—"

"There is now, Bucky.
 
A big one, too...
 
looks like it could be made of
bronze
."

Brian was slow, but he didn't have much of
an imagination, he didn't make up things.
 
If there was a big chest down there, with something in
it...

"I wonder...
"
Buck
said, "... that storm..."

"That's what I was thinkin’.
 
Probably churned it
up."

Buck reached over and helped Brian
aboard.
 
"Let's go for it," he
said.

He rigged the masks and connected Brian's
wires for him and reminded him of the procedures for clearing the
faceplate.
 
Then he mounted the video
camera in its housing, attached a bracket that held two 250-watt lamps — for
insurance if the water was dark, for fill light if it wasn't — and plugged the
connector from the housing into his own mask.
 
He ran a few seconds of tape of himself and Brian in the boat,
then
watched the playback through the viewfinder to make
sure everything was working.
 
The picture
was sharp, the sound perfect.

They sat on either side of the boat and,
on cue, flopped overboard.

Buck went down first, kicking as hard as
he could and guiding himself with his free hand not the wire.
 
The water was murky, and there was a moment
when he found himself suspended in a green haze, unable to see either the
surface or the bottom.
 
He gripped the
wire and stopped.

"Did you check the depth?"
 
Bucks words reverberated hollowly in his
mask.

"I didn't go all the way down,"
Brian said from a few feet up the wire.
 
"I just went till I got a good look."

Buck heard each of Brian's words as
clearly as if he were standing beside his brother on the surface.
 
"Isn't the sound in this thing
fabulous?" he said.

"You're at fifty now," said
Brian.
 
"Drop down another ten,
twenty feet."

Buck exhaled and thrust downward with his
legs, pushing the video camera in front of him.

What he saw first looked like a
yellow-green blur in a pea-green murk; then, as he drew nearer, it took
shape:
 
a perfect rectangle, at least
eight feet long, maybe ten, and about four feet wide and four feet thick.
 
When he was ten feet above it, Buck framed it
in his viewfinder, turned on his lights and swam in a slow circle around it,
taping as he went.

He heard Brian say, "Must be
soemthin’ good if they bothered to buoy it."

"They didn't buoy it, they snagged
it.
 
Look there:
 
that's some kinda sensor head caught
underneath, between the thing and that rock."
 
Buck swam closer.
 
"I don't even think they know what they
got."

"Then it could be
really
good."

"It could... or it could be
fuck-all... just some bronze somebody chucked overboard."

"Why'd anybody do that?
 
You can sell bronze for good money."

"
‘Cause
people are assholes," Buck said.
 
"Anyway, we won't know till we open it."

"You're gonna
open
it?"

"Think of the tape, Brian.
 
Even if the guys from
Oregon
jerk us around, think of the tape
we'll get.
 
First guys
to open a long-lost bronze box.
 
I
tell you, we can sell it to
Eyewitness
News
for...
 
who knows how
much?"

"But suppose there's a body in
it.
 
That wouldn't be—"

"There's no body, unless it's King
Kong himself.
 
Look at the size of the
damn thing.
 
It must've fallen off a
ship, probably something valuable, too, if they took the trouble to case it in
bronze."
 
Buck turned off the camera
and let himself drift down to the sand bottom.
 
He steadied himself, adjusted the lamps, the focus f the lens.
 
"Okay, Brian,
swim
down to it and sit on it so I can take your picture, show how big it is."