Beast (23 page)

“Are you sure you’re in the right place?” Sharp asked.

“The SatNav says I’m on the money, right where he said.”

Sharp looked out the window. There was nothing in the color of the water that suggested a shallow spot; the sea was a uniform gray, like burnished steel. “Drop the anchor,” he said.

“Easy for you to say, navy man,” said Hector. “It’s not your two grand worth of anchor and chain.”

“Drop it. If you lose it, I’ll dive it up for you myself.” Sharp smiled.

Hector looked at him, then said, “Shit,” and pushed the button that released the anchor. They heard a splash, followed by the rattle of chain through the hawsehole in the bow. A crewman in a striped matelot shirt stood on the forepeak and watched the chain plummet.

“Mind if I turn on your side-scan?” Sharp asked.

“Go ahead.”

Sharp turned the switch on the side-scan sonar and pressed his face to the rubber gasket. The gray screen brightened, and a white line appeared, created by reflected sonar impulses, showing the contour of the bottom more than half a mile away. Where is it? he wondered. Where’s the secret shelf that’ll snag the anchor before it disappears into the deep?

He heard Hector say, “I’ll be damned,” and just then a tiny white stroke appeared on the top left corner of the sonar screen, reflecting a little outcropping from the cliff. The rattle of the anchor chain stopped.

“Two hundred and ten feet,” Hector said. “How the hell did Darling know that?”

“Twenty-five years at sea out here, that’s how,” Sharp said. “Whip knows every pimple on the ledge; and he knew how the tide would carry your anchor.”

“Does he know where this giant squid is?”

“Nobody knows that,” Sharp said, and he went down the steps into the cabin.

*

They had dinner in the cabin: microwaved hamburgers, steamed pasta and salad. When they had washed the dishes, Eddie and the two crewmen gathered around the TV and watched a tape of The Hunt for Red October, and Hector returned to the bridge.

Stephanie poured coffee for herself and Sharp, took a cigarette from one of her camera bags and led him outside onto the open stern. The moon was so bright that it extinguished the stars around it; the sea was as flat as glass.

“What about you?” she asked him. “Are you married?”

“No,” Sharp said, and then—he wasn’t sure why—he told her about Karen.

“That’s rough,” she said when he had finished. “I don’t think I could deal with that kind of pain.”

Before Sharp could say anything else, they heard Hector shout, “Hey, navy man!” from the bridge.

They walked forward along a passageway on the port side and up four steel steps to the outside door of the bridge.

“Come here,” Hector said.

Sharp stepped inside the bridge. In darkness, it looked like an abandoned nightclub, for the only lights were the red and green and orange glows from the electronic gear.

“What do you make of that?” Hector said, and he gestured at the side-scan sonar.

“Of what?”

“We’ve been swinging at anchor. I think maybe we swung ourselves right overtop a shipwreck.”

As he bent to the machine, Sharp thought what a nice irony it would be if they did discover an old wreck, unseen and untouched for hundreds of years. They had the submersible, so they could reach the wreck, photograph it, perhaps even recover something from it. Whip would be amazed.

Sharp closed his eyes, then opened them again and let them focus on the gray screen. He knew that side-scan sonar images could be remarkably accurate, if the object being drawn was in good shape, alone and on a flat bottom. He had seen a side-scan picture in National Geographic of a ship that had sunk in the Arctic. The ship sat upright on the bottom, its masts and superstructure clearly visible, looking as if it were about to sail away. But that ship had sunk at anchor in three hundred feet of water. If there was a ship here, it had tumbled for half a mile, probably breaking apart as it fell. It might be nothing more than a heap of scrap.

What he saw was a shapeless smear. He looked at the calibration numbers on the side of the screen: The smear seemed to be twenty or thirty meters long, possibly the right size for a shipwreck.

“It could be,” he said.

“Have a look at it from the sub tomorrow,” said Hector. “A lot of ships were lost around here during the war. Maybe it’s one of them. Give me the loran numbers, will you?”

Sharp stepped away from the sonar screen and crossed the bridge to the loran. He read the numbers aloud to Hector, who scribbled them on a piece of paper.

None of them looked at the sonar screen again. If they had, they would have seen a change in the shapeless smear. They would have seen some lines fade, others appear, as the thing three thousand feet beneath them began to move.

KAREN’S ARMS WERE out, reaching for him; her eyes pleaded for help, and she was screaming, but in a language he couldn’t understand. He tried to reach her, but his legs wouldn’t work. He felt as if he were slogging through transparent mud or being held back by something that forced him to move in slow motion. The closer he got, the farther away she seemed. And then something was chasing her, something he couldn’t see but that must be huge and terrifying, for her fear became panic and her screams grew louder. All of a sudden she disappeared, and the thing chasing her was gone, too, and all that was left was a loud, piercing buzz.

Sharp awoke, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. The bed was small, not his, and the light was dim. Only the buzz remained, an urgent summons from somewhere near his head. He rolled over and saw an intercom phone on the bulkhead. He picked up the phone and mumbled his name.

“Rise and shine, Marcus,” said Stephanie. “Time to

go.”

As he hung up, Sharp felt a rush of adrenaline. He had volunteered for this, but what yesterday had seemed exciting was fast becoming frightening. He had never ridden in a submarine, let alone a submarine a third the size of a subway car. He didn’t like crowded elevators— who did?—and he felt uneasy in interior cabins on ships.

He suddenly wondered if he would discover he was a closet claustrophobe.

Well, he thought, you’ll soon find out.

As he shaved and dressed in jeans, a shirt, wool socks and a sweater, his apprehension gave way once again to excitement. At least this was action, a challenge. At least this was something new. As Stephanie would say, this was living.

The sun had barely cleared the horizon when Sharp arrived in the cabin and poured himself a cup of coffee. Through the windows in the rear of the cabin he saw Eddie and one of the crewmen removing the tarpaulin from the submersible. Stephanie was on the afterdeck, mounting a video camera in an underwater housing. Then, as his gaze wandered to the right, he saw that the Privateer was tied to the port side of the ship. He started out of the cabin, but stopped when he heard Darling’s voice behind him, up on the bridge, talking to Hector.

“Morning, Marcus,” Darling said when Sharp appeared on the bridge. “Are you sure you still want to go down there and freeze your buns off?”

“Yes,” Sharp said. “I’m sure.”

Darling turned to Hector and said, “I’ll have my mate hang off a ways till you launch, then he’ll track the sub on my gear.”

Sharp said, “What are you gonna do, Whip?”

“Keep an eye on you, Marcus,” Darling said, and he smiled. “You’re too valuable to lose.” He left the bridge and walked aft to talk to Mike on the Privateer.

Sharp carried his coffee down to the stern. At the top of a ladder he met Stephanie on her way up, and she gestured for him to follow her through a watertight door above the main cabin and aft of the bridge.

It was the control room for the submersible, and it was dark, lit only by a red bulb in the overhead and by four television monitors that were showing color bars.

One of the crewmen, whom Sharp remembered as Andy, sat before a panel dotted with colored lights and keyboard buttons, wearing a headset and a microphone.

“Andy keeps tabs on all our systems,” Stephanie said. “Your friend Whip will be in here with him—we can talk to him anytime.”

Sharp pointed at the TV monitors. “The submersible is hard-wired to the surface?”

“Everything’s videotaped, for the foundation. One fiber-optic cable does it all. I’ve got video cameras inside and outside the sub, plus my still cameras. Can I give you a camera? We’ll be at different portholes, we may see different things.”

“Sure,” Sharp said, “if you’ve got a real idiot-proof camera. What do you want pictures of? Gorgonian corals? Algae growth?”

“No way.” Stephanie grinned. “Monsters. Nothing but monsters. Great big ones.”

At close range, the submersible looked to Sharp like a giant antihistamine capsule, a Dristan with arms. Each arm had steel pincers on the end, and mounted between them was a video camera in a globular housing.

The sun was higher now, and there wasn’t a breath of breeze. Perspiration poured from Sharp as he lowered himself through the round hatch in the top of the submersible. The crewman manning the crane gave him a thumbs-up sign, and he smiled wanly in reply.

Stephanie was already inside, as was Eddie, wearing a down vest and crouching forward to check his switches and gauges.

The interior of the capsule was a tube, twelve feet long, six feet wide and five feet high. There were three small portholes, one in the bow for Eddie, one on either side for Stephanie and Sharp. A square cushion sat on the steel deck before Sharp’s porthole, and he dropped to his knees and crawled to the cushion. He found that he could sit with his legs curled beneath him, or kneel with his face pressed to the porthole, or lie with his feet raised. But there was no way he could straighten out.

What would happen if he got a cramp? How would he shake it out? Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just do it.

“How long does it take to get to the bottom?” he asked.

“Half an hour,” said Stephanie. “We drop at a hundred feet a minute.”

Not too bad. He could survive for an hour, anyway. “And how long do we spend down there?”

“Up to four hours.”

“Four hours!” Never, Sharp thought. Not a chance.

He heard the hatch slam above him, and a metallic hiss as it was dogged down.

Stephanie passed him a small 35-mm camera with a wide-angle lens, and said, “All loaded and ready to go. Just push the button.”

Sharp tried to take the camera, but it slipped from his sweaty palms, and Stephanie caught it an inch above the steel deck. “You look like death,” she said.

“No kidding.” Sharp wiped his hands on his trousers and took the camera from her.

“What are you worried about? This is a state-of-the-art deep boat, and Eddie is a state-of-the-art pilot.” She smiled. “Right, Eddie?”

“Fuckin’ A,” Eddie said. He mumbled something into the microphone suspended from his headset, and suddenly the capsule jerked and began to rise as the crane lifted it off its cradle and swung it out over the side of the ship. For a moment it yawed back and forth like an amusement-park ride, and Sharp had to brace himself to keep from being tossed across the deck. Then it dropped slowly until it thudded into the water, and its motion changed to a gentle rocking.

Sharp looked through the porthole and saw the sea lapping at the glass. From overhead came the metallic sound of the shackle being released from the submersible’s lifting ring.

The capsule began to sink. Water now covered the portholes. Sharp pushed his cheek to the glass and rolled his eyes upward, straining for one last glance at sunlight. Refracted through the moving water, the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds and the gold of the sun danced together hypnotically.

Then the colors faded, replaced by a monochromatic blue mist. All noise ceased, except for the soft whirring of the electric motor aboard the submersible.

The world had been swallowed by the sea.

Sweat was quickly evaporating from Sharp’s forehead and from under his arms and down his back, and he felt chilly. In less than a minute, the temperature had dropped something like thirty degrees. And yet he was still sweating, not from heat but from fear, and the creeping onset of claustrophobia.

He looked through the porthole and saw that the blue outside was fast deepening to violet. He dared his eyes to wander downward. Rays of sunlight seemed to struggle to light the water, but they were dispersed and consumed. Below, blue yielded to black, and all was night.

They fell slowly, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. Then Sharp realized he was taking comfort in the nothingness, for he began to recall the tales Darling had told him about what lived down here in this night, this dark. And he shivered.

SHARP WAS FREEZING. His wool socks were soaked with the condensation on the inside of the steel capsule. Up on the surface, the wetness had felt cool and comfortable, but now, although the condensation had evaporated, his socks had not dried. His toes were numb, the soles of his feet itched. He put his hands beneath his sweater and tucked them under his arms, and leaned away from the porthole to look over Eddie’s shoulder at his gauges. The outside temperature was 4 degrees centigrade, about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside it wasn’t much warmer, just above 50. They were at two thousand feet, and falling.

Into his microphone Eddie said, “Activating illumination,” and he flicked a switch. Two 1,000-watt lamps on top of the submersible flashed on, casting a flood of yellow that penetrated fifteen or twenty feet before being swallowed by the blackness.

And then a universe of life exploded before Sharp’s eyes. Tiny planktonic animals swirled in and out of the light, a living snowstorm of sea life. An infinitesimal shrimp adhered to his porthole and began to march purposefully across the glass. Something resembling a gray-and-red ribbon with yellow eyes and a pompadour of tiny spikes wriggled up to the porthole, fluttered before it for a moment, then darted away.

“Look,” Eddie said, pointing out his porthole. Sharp craned to see, but whatever it was, was gone. He returned to his own porthole, and a moment later he could see it—it appeared, serenely circling the capsule, a creation of some disturbed imagination.