Benchley, Peter (21 page)

“Little!” Sanders said. “That thing was at least seven feet long.” Confident now that Treece was not going to hurt him, he felt embarrassed, aggressively resentful. He wanted to question Treece’s declarative cockiness.

“If it was five feet, I’m the King of Spain.

Water magnifies everything.”

Sanders felt himself blush. “Even so …”

“Second,” Treece said, “there wasn’t enough blood in the water to make him more than a little nosy.

He was having a look-see. If he’d have got serious, you’d have seen the excitement ripple along his body; he’d’ve got real agitated. And soon as I spotted that, all we had to do is gather together in the air-lift cloud. Sharks won’t go in it, or if they do, they’ll get the hell out in a hurry without waiting to bite anything. The sand clogs their gills, and they hate that: it can kill “em. I had his grandfather try to eat me once-a big

bastard of a tiger shark, all of fifteen feet long comand I just waited him out in the cloud. But sticking him with a knife is the last bloody thing in the world you want to do. The

last!

When you’ve got no other choice, when it’s either stick him or be dinner, then you stick him. But not before.”

“Why?”

“He’s liable to bite you. They’re not supposed to have enough brains to get angry, but I tell you, I’ve seen ‘em do a right fancy imitation of being pissed off. You want to see another reason, get in the water.”

“What? Where?”

Treece tossed him a face mask. “Put this on and hang off the platform.” He said to Gail, “You, too. But for Christ’s sake, don’t go tooting off somewhere.”

Tentatively, not knowing what to expect, David and Gail slipped off the platform and clung to the chains that attached it to the boat. They held their breaths and put their faces in the water.

The scene thirty feet away, on the reef, looked like a gang fight. All that remained of the shark Sanders had stabbed were a few mutilated pieces, and those were being fought over, with savage frenzy, by countless other sharks. Half a dozen large tiger sharks flailed in a blurred ball around a piece of offal. A smaller shark chased a shred of flesh to the bottom, took it in his mouth, and sped away, pursued by two others. There were sharks everywhere, swimming in frantic bursts, responding to smells and sounds and commotion in the water, searching for prey. Some were gray, some brown, some striped.

Large sharks took random swipes at smaller ones, who darted out of reach-or, when they were not quick enough, were wounded and set upon by the mob.

As the Sanderses watched, more and more dark, sinuous shapes glided out of the twilight blue. One cruised directly beneath the boat, and, seeing something on the surface, rose toward them. They hoisted themselves onto the platform and climbed into the boat.

Treece and Coffin were counting ampules on the deck. Treece did not look up. “See what you did?” He was not gloating; his tone of voice said simply: Now you understand.

“I see.”

Gail said, “How long will they stay around?”

“Till the food runs out. But if they’re beating up on each other like they usually do, the food won’t run out. They’ll be there a good long while.”

“So today’s wiped,” Sanders said. “I’m sorry.”

“Aye.” Treece relented. “It’s no great tragedy. We got a fair load for today, and one thing about those beasts: They’ll keep anybody else from messing around down there.”

Gail shivered. She removed her wet-suit top and dried herself. “How many have you got?”

“Four thousand”-Treece looked at Coffin-“eight hundred and seventy,” Coffin said, wrapping the last plastic bag of ampules.

“Not enough.” Treece looked at the shore. “And not much bloody time. I imagine Cloche has had people on the bluffs all day.”

Coffin said, “He can’t make ‘em into good divers in two days. And he’ll have to build an air lift.

Can’t send a bunch of bunnies out here to pick around in the sand with their fingers.”

“Two days, no. But not much more than that, to make ‘em middling competent. And when he’s ready, they’re going to come fast. I think maybe we’ll be working nights, too.” He saw a look of chagrin on Gail’s face, and he said, “Not tonight. We’ll give your bugle a rest.”

“What will you do with this?” Sanders rested his hand on the artillery shell.

“Nothing, for now. I just wanted to get it out of there.

Later on, I’ll clean it up and sell the brass.”

“Is it really live, after thirty years?”

“Aye.” Treece said. He set the shell in a vise bolted to the starboard gunwale. From a locker he took a huge wrench which he fit to the bottom of the shell. He tugged on the handle, but the wrench didn’t budge. “Corroded into a bloody weld.” He braced his foot against the bulkhead, wrapped both hands around the wrench, and leaned back.

His biceps balled into tight knots; the sinews in his neck strained against the skin, and a red hue suffused his face.

There was a metallic squeak, then the sound of a crack, and the wrench handle moved. Treece heaved again and

broke the seal. He unscrewed the bottom of the shell and dropped it on the deck. “Look here.”

The interior of the shell was filled with stiff, gray, spaghettilike strands, bunched tightly together.

Coffin handed Treece a pair of pliers and a box of matches. Treece fished one of the strands from the shell casing and, holding it with the pliers, gave Sanders the matches. “Light it.”

“What is it?”

“Cordite. That’s what makes everything explode.”

Sanders held a match to the end of the cordite strand.

There was a flash, and the strand burned with the brilliance of magnesium.

Gail said, “That’s all there is to a shell that big?”

“All? Christ, girl, pack a hundred of ‘em together and touch a primer charge to ‘em, and you can blow Bermuda to pieces.”

“How many are there?”

“No way to know,” Coffin said. “There was about ten ton when we started, but some of it’s been salvaged.”

Treece tossed the cordite overboard. It hissed as it hit the water, and, sinking, emitted a stream of bubbles.

They fetched the air hoses from the water and coiled them on the deck. Treece fastened the air-lift tube to the gunwale, then started the engine.

Charlotte, who had been sleeping on the bow, lurched to her feet and-like a soldier reluctantly assuming a midnight watch-took her post on the pulpit.

Coffin hoisted the anchor, and Treece eased the boat through the reefs and headed for shore.

“What time tomorrow?” Coffin said.

“Early. Say eight o’clock. We’ll do four or five hours in the morning, dry off for the afternoon, and start again around six.” He teased Coffin. “I know you old folks need your afternoon nap.”

“The hell you say!” The boat was still seventy-five yards from shore. “I’ll outlast ‘em all.”

Coffin hopped onto the gunwale and dove overboard.

Treece watched, grinning, until he saw Coffin surface and start to swim toward shore. Then he swung the boat seaward.

As the boat rose and fell in the gentle swells, something slid off the steering console and clattered to the deck: the escutcheon plate. Gail

picked it up and handed it to Treece.

“Lordy, I almost forgot about that,” he said, adding, with a smile at Sanders, “what with all the excitement caused by the daredevil shark hunter.”

“Adam said it was a plate that went around a lock.”

“Aye, but not just any lock. I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know that any others still exist. It was called a three-lock box.

See the three keyholes; it took three keys to open the lock.”

Sanders said, “What was the point of that?”

“To keep one or two people from making off with the goodies inside. Three partners, three keys. Say someone was sending something from the New World back to Spain. The King had a master set, all three keys. The man in wherever it was-Havana-probably had two, the captain of the ship one. They locked the box in Havana, and

the captain took it aboard ship. He couldn’t open it with only one key. When he got to Spain, he presented the box to the King.”

“Wouldn’t be hard to pry open.”

“No, but they didn’t usually. The Spaniards took locks as … well, not holy, but special. The British and Dutch sent documents and what-all back and forth in regular boxes; if a ship was pirated, that was that. No lock would do any good. The Spaniards locked everything, almost symbolically. But a three-lock box!” Treece ran his fingers over the escutcheon plate. “Aye, that is interesting.”

“Why?”

“It means there was something very damned important in that box. More’n likely, something very damned important to the King of Spain.”

By the time they tied up to Treece’s dock, the sun was resting on the western horizon, a swollen ball of orange.

Treece sniffed the evening air and said, “Going to get messy tomorrow.”

Sanders” impulse was to ask Treece how he knew the weather would change, but by now he could anticipate the answer, something like “Got a feeling” or “You can smell a breeze coming.” So he said instead, “How bad?”

“Maybe twenty knots, out of the south. It’ll bounce us around a fair amount.”

“Can we work?”

“Got no choice. Cloche’ll be working, you can bet on that. It’ll be all right; we’ll weight-up heavy.”

Sanders began to peel off his wet-suit pants, but Treece stopped him.

“We’re not done yet.”

“We’re not?”

“Got to put away the ampules. Can’t leave “em lying around on the boat.”

“I know, but I figured …” He stopped when he saw Treece pointing overboard at the dark water. “Oh.”

“I want you to know where they are, in case something happens to me.”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“Who knows? Maybe a terminal case of the ague, or a sudden onset of heebie-jeebies. Maybe nothing. It’s just insurance. There’s a cave underwater at the base of the cliff. Tide washes it, but if we put ‘em way back and bury ‘em, they’ll stay.” He turned to Gail. “You don’t need to come.”

“I can,” she said, “if you want me to.”

“No. You’ll be more use up here, passing bags to us.”

They rigged two scuba tanks and brought the bags of ampules up from below. Treece half-filled the canvas bags, then handed Sanders a flashlight. “Overweight yourself,” he said. “That bag’ll want to come to the surface. Adam squeezed all the air he could out of the plastic bags, but you can’t get every last bit. If you’re way heavy, you can let your weights drag you and the bag to the bottom. When you get down, follow my light.”

“Okay.”

Treece pointed to a rectangular wooden box on the dock and said to Gail, “Fetch me a fish out of that box.”

“A fish?”

“Aye. It’s full of salted fish. I keep ‘em there for Percy. He lives in the cave.”

Gail climbed onto the dock and opened the lid of the wooden box. The smell of fish made her step backward and hold her breath.

“Pick a big one,” Treece called. “Want to keep him occupied so he doesn’t take a shine to us.”

“What’s Percy?” Sanders asked.

“A frightful big moray eel, a green. He’s lived in that cave long as I can remember.

We get along all right, but he’s a hungry bastard, and I like to keep on his good side by giving him dinner now and again.”

Gail reached into the fish box and grabbed the largest tail she saw. She swallowed, to keep from gagging.

“Don’t you keep ice?”

“No need. Salt keeps ‘em fine.” Treece took the fish from her. “That ought to keep him busy for a while.” He said to Sanders, “Let me go in first.

I want to see him, make sure he knows what’s going on. Let a bastard like that blind-side you, it’ll be a nasty evening. And don’t go sticking your hands in any holes. For all I know, he’s got relatives in there sharing the rent with him.” He lowered his mask over his face, rolled off the gunwale, resurfaced, and reached for bag, fish, and light.

Sanders followed immediately and found, as Treece had said, that the extra weight and the air trapped in the plastic bags roughly counterbalanced each other, so he sank without effort.

The cove was not deep-fifteen or, at most, twenty feet, Sanders estimated as he watched the beam from his light move between the sandy bottom and the boat above. The canvas bag was cumbersome: it tugged at his left arm, so Sanders pressed it against his stomach and followed Treece’s receding light.

Treece waited at the entrance to the cave-a dark hole, taller than a man, in the craggy face of the cliff. When Sanders joined him, Treece shined his light into the cave and swung it from side to side.

At first, the cave seemed to be empty-pocked gray limestone walls extending thirty feet into the darkness. Then Treece fixed his light on a back corner of the cave and pointed with his finger, and Sanders saw something move.

Slowly, Treece swam into the cave, holding the fish in front of him. Sanders trailed a few feet behind.

At the base of one wall there was a heap of rocks, the result of a partial collapse of the wall ages ago. Treece held the fish up to the wall.

The snout of the moray emerged from a crevice between the rocks and the wall. Sanders had seen morays in aquariums, but never anything to rival the size of the green body that now slithered out of the crevice. It was more than a foot thick, top to bottom, and at least six inches wide.

The moray writhed and twisted until it had extricated as much of itself-about four feet-as it intended to. Then it hung suspended from the rocks, glancing, with its cold pig eyes, at Sanders, at Treece, at the fish. The mouth opened and closed rhythmically, exposing the long needle teeth joined by viscid, mucous strands that glittered in the light.

The head tilted slightly and-so quickly that, afterward, Sanders would not recall having seen it move-seized the fish.

Treece did not let go; he held the fish just forward of the tail. The moray pulled, then stopped, then suddenly began to spin its body, like a rug unrolling, until a chunk of fish belly tore away. The eel backed off, swallowing, its teeth forcing the flesh back into its throat, green skin rippling with the effort. Then it struck again, this time grabbing the fish’s backbone, and yanked the fish from Treece’s grasp. It tried to retreat into its hole, but the fish was too big to fit sideways through the crevice, so the moray contented itself with jamming its prey into the narrow opening and dismembering it from below.