Flashback (7 page)

First order of business was to catch Mack's eye and draw her finger across her throat. He cut his engine as if he'd been expecting the request. Despite the heat, faint wraiths of steam rose from the Atlantic. In the back of her mind, Anna made a note to have Danny check it. Clearly it was running too hot. She gave the quiet a moment to settle their scattered thoughts, then spelled out what she needed.

The Bay Ranger, the boat Bob took on patrol, was not in its slip. The first question was answered: Bob had not returned to the fort. If they found him, it would be at sea.

The Reef and Atlantic Rangers, both twenty-five-foot Boston Whalers, and the researcher's boat, the Curious, a twenty-foot Maco, would be captained by Anna, Mack and Danny, respectively. Running the spotlights and acting as a second pair of eyes: Teddy on the Reef with Anna, Cliff with Mack and Linda on the Curious with Daniel.

One hundred square miles: on the map it didn't appear that sizable. For three small boats searching at night, the area was formidable. Anna divided it into rectangles, east, central and west. She and Teddy went west; Mack and Cliff took the middle; Danny and Linda the eastern third. The plan was simple: mentally lay a grid over the sector and drive the boats in a zigzag pattern along imaginary lines.

Having cleared the harbor, Anna pushed the throttle till the boat planed, and steered southwest past Loggerhead Key.

The search was to be blessed with absolutely flat water. The air was so still and warm and wet it felt as if it had knit together, forming a heavy blanket that crushed the movement of the ocean. The Atlantic lay still as a pool in a deep cavern. Water and sky were tropical ink, the stars and the moon startlingly bright by contrast.

Teddy stood beside Anna. The moon was several days past full, but with clear sky above and glittering sea below it gave the illusion of much light. Its cool silver touch thinned Teddy's face and collected in shadows under her usually invisible cheekbones. Straight, proud, grim and unspeaking, her hair slipping behind her in a wind of their own making, she looked every inch the courageous yet tragic heroine. Anna wondered if she played out a role in the fantasy she and her husband so assiduously cultivated. The uncharitable thought that the Shaws, craving heroics and acts of derring-do, had staged this whole disappearance for the twisted fun of it-a ranger version of Munchausen's syndrome-crossed Anna's mind.

They reached the buoy marking the southwestern boundary of the park. Anna cut her engines and showed Teddy how to work the searchlight, moving it in slow arcs aimed low to pick up shadows of anything floating on the water's surface. Then, engine just above idle, they started the painstaking process of searching.

Twice they spotted floating objects. Both were lobster traps. Outside park boundaries, lobster fishermen laid their lines; traps on the ocean floor tied one to another with floating buoys to mark where they lay. Storms, faulty lines and ships' propellers routinely set the traps and buoys free to drift into park waters. Anna dutifully hauled them onboard. Disposing of them was problematical. Already Fort Jefferson had a pile the size of a Sherman tank in one of the casemates. The only way to get rid of the Styrofoam floats was to get somebody to haul them to the mainland. Cliff and Linda weren't anxious to add garbage scow to the Activa's resume.

Lobster traps were the sum total of excitement until they'd worked north past Loggerhead and a faint green-gray light on the eastern horizon suggested sunrise. Then they got a call from Danny.

"Got something," he said succinctly.

"What?" Anna radioed back.

Never particularly disciplined on the airwaves, Danny replied: "A whole shit-load. Oil. Flotsam. We're about three-quarters of a mile west of East Key. Better get on over here. We'll flash our light."

"Oh, God," Teddy murmured. Her stoicism evaporated and, with it, Anna's doubts about the veracity of Bob's disappearance. Had the Shaws planned a bit of theatrics, oil and flotsam obviously hadn't factored in.

"Easy," Anna said. "We don't know what Danny found. Could be a spill from a passing tanker." Lame, she thought and pushed the throttle forward heading east. Within minutes, Teddy spotted Danny's light flashing. Anna adjusted her course accordingly. Over the radio, just under the burr of engine noise, she heard Danny calling Mack to make sure he and Linda had gotten the message.

As they neared the Curious, she slowed to a crawl and told Teddy to work the searchlight. Faint and iridescent, a sheen of oil spread across the water, breaking into toxic rainbows in the wake of the Reef Ranger. Pieces of flotsam running with petroleum-induced colors floated in the mess, as did other, less identifiable bits of what had presumably been a boat.

"Holy smoke," Anna muttered. "It didn't just sink, it was blown to kingdom come."

Teddy had her knuckles shoved in her mouth to stop her emotions from bleating forth. In the backwash of the light Anna caught the liquid glitter of tears. Teddy's eyes glowed, large and unsettling, like an animal's in the night.

Anna put the engine into reverse and stopped their forward motion. The engine stilled, she took the searchlight from Teddy and began slow, sweeping arcs across the greasy black water. From Danny's boat Linda let her searchlight follow Anna's, doubling the wattage. The sheen of oil was thin and would dissipate in an hour or more, scattering itself till it would be detectable only to sensitive instruments. That it was still obvious to the naked eye could be accounted for by the fact that sea and sky were preternaturally still. The disturbance from the Reef Ranger's arrival continued to move under the mess, though at a greater distance now, like ripples on a pond.

"Not much left," Danny said of what they were assuming had once been a boat.

Though the Reef and the Curious were fifty or sixty feet apart, in the absolute silence he sounded so close Anna's skin twitched like a horse's when a fly alights.

"Not much," she agreed.

The lights were picking out only hits and fragments: fiberglass, wood. A ship's line, made to float and bright screaming yellow, caught the light so suddenly it seemed to snake through the oil.

"Line," Linda said unnecessarily. To Anna's knowledge the first mate neither smoked nor drank strong liquor, but her voiced rasped, bourbon over gravel, like a skid-row actor.

"I see it."

"We got a piece of hull," Danny said. "See if you can spot it for 'em, Linda. It wasn't one of ours. Not white. Green. Kind of a glittery metallic bottle green like those newer speedboats got. I don't think it was Bob went down."

Beside her Anna heard a low mewling cry, barely audible and the first sound Teddy Shaw had made since Danny radioed.

"Look." Linda pointed with her light south of the circle of oil. "Not the hull but something." The sun had crept closer to the horizon, chasing faint pink-and-gold light ahead to reflect off the water. Against this backdrop, Linda's keen eyes had spotted a shape.

The Reef was closest. "I'll get it," Anna said.

Having started the engine, she backed slowly away from the slick, wanting to disturb things as little as possible. She motored up close, and Teddy lifted the thing out of the water with a boat hook and dropped it on deck. "A life jacket," Anna called to the Curious.

"Not one of ours," Teddy said, and Anna could hear the relief Teddy'd not had the courage to feel till tangible proof it was not her husband's boat was in her hands.

"Whoever it belonged to wasn't wearing it. Straps are intact, buckles unbroken," Anna said. "Probably shoved under a seat and blown free in the explosion."

"Bob always wears his. Always," Teddy said. Hope was added to the relief, and Anna was glad for her.

Bob religiously wore a personal flotation device. It wasn't standard issue but one of those sleek little jobs that rest at the small of the back. It would keep him afloat but had to be deployed. If he were unconscious when he hit the water it would prove nothing but an additional anchor dragging him to the bottom.

The hum of an approaching boat caught Anna's attention. She threaded back around the cabin to the radio and called the Atlantic Ranger.

"Mack," she said when he'd answered. "We've got oil and flotsam. Looks like a boat blew up, burned to waterline and sank. It's not the Bay Ranger. No sign of Bob or his boat. You and Cliff keep looking. Linda and I'll dive on this as soon as the light gets a little stronger."

Silence followed, then a couple clicks of the mike as Mack fingered it. "We'll need to give you a hand with that," he said finally.

"Linda and I'll take a look. If we need you or Cliff to help with the underwater work, I'll give you a call."

Another silence, then: "Ten-four." The National Park Service had abandoned the ten codes years before, choosing plain speaking for their radio communications, but some of the numbers, ten-four for "okay" and ten-twenty for "location" had become so ingrained in everyday language that they persisted.

Anna could understand Mack's reticence to continue the search. In a post so isolated the arrival of groceries and mail was considered a grand occasion it would be hard to be turned away from a bonefide adventure. Quicker than thought, she sent a prayer down to Poseidon that this would prove to be the peak of the day's excitement and that Bob would turn up unharmed and with a good excuse for his nocturnal wandering. She doubted her prayer would be heard. Bob was a stickler for rules. If he were alive, he would have radioed in. The usual reasons for a man staying out all night didn't apply at Fort Jefferson. The only single women near enough for an assignation were the lighthouse keepers on Loggerhead Key and Donna and Patrice not only outweighed and towered over Ranger Shaw but had eyes only for each other.

For the duration of the dive, Anna abdicated leadership to Linda. For Anna, scuba diving was a sport. On several occasions, the most notable being in the icy waters of Lake Superior, she'd gone on difficult or dangerous dives, but compared to the first mate of the Activa she was a neophyte. Linda had participated in and led dives all over the world. She had rescued other divers, recovered bodies and searched for sunken treasure. Treasure was one of the lures that had brought her, finally, to the Dry Tortugas, a major shipping lane during the days when Spanish galleons were heavy with gold plundered from the Incas and the Aztecs.

Today would have more to do with bodies than booty, Anna suspected. Or, worse, pieces of bodies. Whole corpses didn't bother her much, but bits here and there were a tad unsettling. And, though she would never admit it even to herself, she wasn't all that gung ho to go flippering around in what might amount to fisherman soup.

The Reef was rafted off the Curious, and Anna and Teddy joined Linda and Danny on the research boat. Danny had backed it up to be well clear of the oil slick so the divers wouldn't foul their gear or get petroleum on the neoprene of their wet suits when they went over the side. As Anna and Linda donned dive suits and scuba gear, the sun sprang from the sea. In these latitudes there was little twilight; day and night were sudden and complete. While Anna buckled and tugged and checked equipment, Linda went through her safety spiel. Wrecks, especially recent wrecks, were notoriously unstable. It was possible parts of it could still be burning. The women took a moment to rehearse the rudimentary hand signals: help, look and go to the surface. Then they rolled off the gunwale into the water. Because the air temperature had yet to rise with the sun, the water was a few degrees warmer and the initial plunge felt good, like the first immersion in a warm bath. Suddenly weightless and warm, Anna felt her muscles relax and her mind empty of the surface's fussy thoughts.

The sun low, water made murky by the recent disturbance, the bottom was a mottled dark area seen through a fog of particulate matter. Anna guessed the depth at around thirty or forty feet. The boat they sought had gone down in what was considered deep water in the shallow, reef-filled park. Just to the east of the boundary line the ocean floor dropped thousands of feet down a sheer wall.

Quicker to get oriented, Linda gestured "follow me." Her fins, long and sleek, were of that strange neon color cities had taken to painting fire trucks in the late seventies, a shade between yellow and lime. Not pretty but surprisingly visible. Anna followed their flicking toward where the boat had exploded, burned and, presumably, sunk.

Visibility got worse, but not by much. A lot of the particles had settled. The blast must have come early on, between midnight and two or three in the morning. Any earlier and someone at the fort would have heard and reported it. Swimming along in this sea of thoughts and other flotsam it occurred to Anna that someone had heard it. She'd heard it. It had almost awakened her. Tangled in dreams of the Civil War brought on by Great-Great-Aunt Raffia's letter, her unconscious mind had transmuted it into cannon fire. There was no way to prove that had been the case but, looking back, Anna was pretty sure it was. The knowledge was of little practical value. Not having fully awakened, she had no idea what time she'd heard the explosion.

Doesn't matter, she told herself. Boat fires were stunningly fast. Even if she'd leapt from her bed and sprinted to the Reef Ranger, this boat would have burned to waterline before she could have reached it.

And Bob?

That thought Anna pushed away. Too little information yet for self-recrimination.

The iridescent fins ahead of her stopped. Anna kicked to where Linda hung, suspended fifteen feet above the ocean floor. Beneath them was what remained of the boat whose blood sheened the surface. Guessing from the mess scattered over broken coral reefs, it had been a cigarette-type boat, long and lean and fast; basically huge engines and fuel tank housed in a bullet-shaped fiberglass body. This one was larger than most Anna had seen; maybe thirty feet long when it was in one piece. At present, fragments of it were strewn over an area three times that.