Beast (22 page)

“UDT training?” said Wallingford. “Christ, Sharp, these people aren’t here to blow anything up. They’re magazine hotshots who want to be the first to take pictures of a live giant squid … a squid that, from what I hear, is probably a thousand miles away from here by now.”

“What’s the deal with the Bermuda government? I’d’ve thought the last thing Bermuda wanted was any more publicity.”

“Money. What else? Bermuda’s hurting. Tourism is in the dumper. Hotels are in trouble, restaurants are in trouble, sport fishing has pretty well stopped. The diving business is out of business. When these people from Voyager—”

“Voyager?”

“It’s the magazine. It’s new, started by some guy in the ball-bearing business with a ton of money. They had their brand-new Finnish submersible down in the Cayman Islands, taking pictures of weird things in deep water, and when they heard about the squid up here, they saw it as a chance for a coup—a scoop that might catapult ‘em into the league with National Geographic. The Geographic doesn’t have a submersible. Nobody does, no Americans anyway, except the navy, and we only have one that’s worth a damn. At any rate, Bermuda said to itself, Hey, why not let them in? If they find the squid, fine, maybe they can figure out a way to kill it. If not, let them spend their time and money looking around, and when they don’t find the squid, we can publicize the hell out of the fact that the thing is gone, and tell the world Bermuda’s safe again.”

“Where does the navy fit in? I mean, these are Bermuda waters, this seems—”

“Where do we fit? Sharp, come on… . Bermuda has no waters. These are NATO waters by law. But the fact is, they’re American. Every drop. Do you really think the Bermudians put down all those sonar trackers? Do you think the Bermudians laid all those cables, the ones that keep track of Soviet subs? This is America out here, Sharp. And when the Pentagon heard about this deal, about that ship with all the high-tech gear, they were all over me like sweat, to make sure I got a U.S. Navy man on the ship and on the submersible. Nobody, I don’t care if they’re American citizens or Munchkins, nobody is gonna poke around our deep-water assets without our being right beside him, looking over his shoulder.”

Wallingford leaned back in his chair. “So there it is, Sharp,” he said. “Now, as for you, why would you want to go down in that thing? You think you’ll spot some shipwrecks for your pal Whip Darling?”

“No, sir,” Sharp said quickly, embarrassed. It had never occurred to him that Wallingford knew about his using helicopter time to cruise above the reefs and look for wrecks. He should have realized it, however, since he was never alone on the chopper, there was always at least one person with him, and the navy base was a tiny community full of people with plenty of time to gossip. “What would be the point?” he added. “Even if I saw something at five hundred or a thousand feet, there’d be no way to recover it.”

“What is it, then?” said Wallingford. “What makes you want to go half a mile down into the ocean, with people you don’t know, in a little steel coffin, to look for something that probably isn’t there and might kill you if it is?”

“Because …” Sharp hesitated, knowing that most people would have trouble understanding his reasoning. “It’s something I’ve never done before. I want to see what it’s like.”

“You’ve never been to the moon before, either. Would you go to the moon if somebody asked you?”

“Yes, sir. Yes, I surely would.”

“God almighty, Sharp,” Wallingford said, shaking his head. “Okay, you’ve got it. Be at Dockyard at sixteen hundred. They’re gonna go out and anchor tonight, and put the sub down first thing tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Sharp. “How official is this? Should I wear a uniform?”

“No. But take a sweater and some warm socks. I hear it’s cold three thousand feet down there in the dark.”

“Yes, sir.” Sharp saluted and turned to go.

“Sharp,” Wallingford said, stopping him at the door.

“Sir?”

“I was gonna send you, even if you hadn’t volunteered.” Wallingford grinned. “I just wanted to hear you make your case.”

Back in his quarters, Sharp packed an overnight bag, and threw in a Walkman, a few tapes and a book. By the time he had taken a shower and put on a pair of jeans and a denim shirt, it was nearly 1500. Dockyard was at the other end of Bermuda, an hour away by motorbike, so he picked up his bag and started out of the room. At the door he remembered that he had been scheduled to go diving the next day with Darling, and so he went back inside and picked up the phone.

Darling’s wife answered, and before Sharp could leave a message she said Whip was down on the boat and she’d go fetch him. While he waited, Sharp wondered whether he should tell Darling where he was going. Knowing the navy’s passion for secrecy, he assumed that this trip was classified, even though it involved a national magazine that planned to document it on film. But the navy liked to classify everything, from the number of potatoes bought for the mess to the price paid for enlisted men’s socks.

Screw secrecy, he decided. The odds were good that Darling knew all about it anyway.

“Glad you called, Marcus,” Darling said when he picked up the phone. “I was gonna call you. How about a rain check for tomorrow’s diving? There’s a bunch of people here from some magazine who want to put a submarine down to take pictures of the squid. They’ve hired me as escort.”

“You’re going? What do you mean, escort?”

“They don’t know where to look for the thing. They don’t know where the drop-off is, or where the bottom shelves off, or where the deep begins. They’ve got a fathometer and a side-scan sonar, and if they took the time they could find out for themselves. But that boat must cost ten thousand a day to run, so they see using me as a shortcut.”

“And you agreed to go? I thought—”

“Marcus. It’s a thousand dollars a day. But all I’ll do is show ‘em where to go, tell ‘em where to aim their cameras and float around over their submarine in case it has to surface away from the ship.” Darling laughed. “You can be damn sure I’m not going down in that sub.”

“Whip,” Sharp said, and he paused, feeling his enthusiasm begin to ebb. “I’m supposed to go with them.”

“You? What for?”

“The navy’s worried that they’ll snoop around our sonar gear, maybe decide to justify their expenses by doing a story on how much money we’re wasting monitoring Soviet submarines that don’t exist.”

“What makes Wallingford so sure they won’t find the squid?”

“The navy thinks it’s gone away,” Sharp said. “So do the people from the Oceanographic Administration and Scripps.”

“Well, I don’t. Neither does Talley, or he would have gone back to Canada. No, it’s likely that the critter is down there, Marcus. I’m pretty sure he’s down there somewhere.” For a moment there was silence on the line, then Darling said, “You said you were going with them. You don’t mean you’re going down in that submarine.”

“Sure,” Sharp said. “That’s the whole point.”

“Don’t.”

“I have to, Whip.”

“No you don’t, Marcus.” Darling paused, then said, “There’s one thing we both have to remember: There’s a big difference between being brave and being foolish.”

THE ROYAL NAVY Dockyard had been built in the nineteenth century by convicts—called “transports,” for they had been transported out from England and housed in prison hulks grounded on the muddy bottom of Grassy Bay. Its stone walls were more than ten feet thick, its cobbled streets had been paved by hand. It occupied the entire northern end of Ireland Island, and had once been a civilization unto itself. There had been barracks for hundreds of soldiers, cook houses, jail cells, sail lofts, chandleries, rope lockers and armories.

Now, as Sharp walked along the quay toward the little ship tied to the dock, a dock that still occasionally sheltered British and American ships-of-the-line, he passed boutiques, cafes, souvenir shops, a museum.

Lettering on the transom identified the ship as the Ellis Explorer, from Fort Lauderdale. Measuring his paces, Sharp walked along the dock beside the ship. She was 150 feet long, more or less, and most of her was open stern. About halfway between the fantail and the cabin, the submersible rested on its cradle, covered by a tarpaulin. Clearly, the ship was brand-new, built, he guessed after appraising its sleek lines, in Holland or Germany, and it was meticulously tended. There wasn’t a speck of rust on the hull, not a chip or a scuff mark on the paint. Ropes on the deck were perfectly coiled, and the steel-and-aluminum superstructure gleamed in the afternoon sun. Whoever owns this vessel, he thought, isn’t worried about money.

A woman stood in the bow, tossing pieces of bread to a school of little fish.

“Hello,” Sharp said.

She turned to him and said, “Hi.” She was in her late twenties, tall and lithe and deeply tanned. She wore cutoff jeans, a man’s Oxford shirt with its tails tied at her waist and a Rolex diver’s watch. Her sun-bleached brown hair was cut short and swept back from her face. A pair of sunglasses hung from a cord around her neck.

“I’m Marcus Sharp… . Lieutenant Sharp.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Come on aboard.”

Sharp walked up the gangway and stepped onto the deck.

“I’m Stephanie Carr,” the woman said, smiling and holding out her hand. “I take pictures.” She led him aft, into the cabin.

The cabin was large and comfortably furnished. There were two folding tables on gimbals, two vinyl-covered sofas bolted to the deck, a stack of plastic chairs, racks of paperback books and, on a shelf, a television set and VCR. Steps led up to the bridge forward and down to the galley and the staterooms aft.

A short, wiry man with a crew cut, who might have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five, sat on the deck and watched a tape of a James Bond movie.

“That’s Eddie,” Stephanie said. “He drives the sub. Eddie, this is Marcus.”

Eddie gestured distractedly and said, “Hey.”

Sharp noticed that one of the tables was littered with cameras, strobes, light meters and boxes of film. “Do you have a writer with you?” he asked Stephanie.

“No,” she said. “I do it all. Besides, if we get pictures of this monster, no one’s going to care about words.” She pointed to the staircase aft. “There are a couple of empty cabins below. You can put your stuff wherever you want.”

Sharp tossed his bag onto a chair. “Who’s Ellis?” he said. “The name—Ellis Explorer.”

“Barnaby Ellis … Ellis Bearings … the Ellis Foundation … Ellis Publications. The bearings funded the foundation, the foundation owns the boat. When one of the publications needs the boat, they borrow it from the foundation.”

“You work for him?”

“No, I’m free lance. I work for the Geographic, for Traveler, for whoever wants to pay me.”

“Hey, navy man,” a voice called down from the bridge.

“Come meet Hector,” Stephanie said, and she led the way up onto the bridge.

Hector appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was dark-skinned and beefy, and he wore a starched white shirt with captain’s shoulder boards, creased black trousers and spit-shined black shoes. He was working with a pencil and a ruler on a chart of the waters around Bermuda. “This Darling,” he said, “he tells me to go anchor out here”—he tapped a spot on the chart—“but out here there’s no bottom.”

“Did he talk you through it?” Sharp asked.

“Every step. Around the point here, north from here to the buoy, then northwest to here. But the chart says there’s no bottom till five hundred fathoms. I can’t anchor in five hundred fathoms.”

“Do what he says,” said Sharp. “If he says there’s a bottom there, there’s a bottom there. It may be a sea mount, it may be a ledge. It may be part of the shelf.”

“But the chart—”

“Captain,” Sharp said, “in Bermuda, if I had to choose between some mapmaker from Coast and Geodetic Survey and Whip Darling, I’d go with Whip Darling every time.”

It was after five when they left the point at Dockyard behind and headed north toward the channel markers. Sharp and Stephanie stood on the observation deck atop the cabin and watched the little puffs of cumulus cloud change color as the lowering sun struck them from different angles.

“Where do you live?” Sharp asked.

“San Francisco, sort of. But nowhere, really. I keep a tiny apartment there, just to have a place to come back to, but I’m away ten or eleven months a year.”

“So you’re not married.”

“Hardly,” she said, smiling. “Who’d have me? He’d never see me. When I got started in this business—fresh out of college, I was working for a little paper in Kansas, and I moonlighted wildlife pictures—I knew I’d have to make a choice. I knew I couldn’t have it both ways. A lot of my friends are photographers who specialize in what I do—sports, adventure, animals—and of the ones who get married, ninety percent get divorced.”

“Is it worth it?”

“It has been. I’ve been everywhere in the world, my passport’s as thick as the phone book. I’ve met a lot of people, done a lot of crazy things, photographed everything from tigers to army ants. But I’m beginning to get tired of it. Now and then, I think about settling down. But every time I do, the phone rings, and I’m off to somewhere new.” She waved her hand at the sea, and said, “Like now.”

“How much do you know about giant squid?”

“Nothing. Well, almost nothing. I read a couple of articles on the way over. I gather that nobody’s ever gotten a picture of one, and that’s enough for me; it isn’t often one of us gets to do something that’s never been done before.”

“There’s a reason, you know. They’re rare, and they’re dangerous.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s the fun of it, right? Look at it this way, Marcus. We’re getting paid to do what other people couldn’t do if they had all the money in the world: take chances and make discoveries. It’s called living.”

As Sharp looked at her, he suddenly felt a stab of pain that he hadn’t felt in many months, the pain of remembering Karen.

“I tell you,” Hector said, pointing at the fathometer, “there’s no bottom here.” A faint orange light whirled on a circular screen, blipping brighter as it passed the mark for 480 fathoms.