Flashback (8 page)

It looked as though the blast had been centered around the engine compartment. The stern had been severed from the rest of the hull and lay at an awkward angle against a coral boulder. The living coral was gouged by the impact and scored by propeller blades. Jagged chunks of ripped and melted fiberglass reached around what had been a bench seat and was now a lump of charred plastic. A bright orange personal flotation device was tethered to it. Buoyant innards trailed out like intestines from a mutilated trunk. One of the straps had caught on the twisted fiberglass, condemning the float to death by drowning.

Thirty feet away was the foreshortened bow section. Two cabin doors of clamshell design like those in cowboy saloons had been ripped away.

One lay on the sand near the wreck, the other was still attached by a length of metal or fiberglass. The rectangle opening into the boat's low-ceilinged cabin was twisted until it resembled a door drawn by a very small child; the lines bent and blurred, none of the corners square. A scrap of cloth-pant leg or sleeve-reached out from the dark interior. Because the water was still, it did not wave or sway but stood out, a flag in a still life.

Surrounding the two major pieces of the wreck, lying on white sand, scattered across coral, sea fans, sponges and stone, were the shattered remains of the boat's midsection. Much of it was mangled to the point that it was unrecognizable. Here and there were the bizarre anomalies that often accompany tornadoes and explosions. A boat hook, purposely blunt and attached to a long pole, had been thrown clean as a javelin into the sand, its haft sticking up, a piece of paper neatly skewered by the head. The lens of a running light, detached from the hull but otherwise unharmed, lay fifteen feet from the main wreck gleaming ruby-bright, dead center in a circle of green coral.

The Dry Tortugas's underwater camera rode in a zippered nylon pouch attached to Anna's web gear. She took it out. Even from a distance of twenty feet the photos would not be good. The water was cloudy and the light weak. Later she would take clearer shots, but she wanted to record the lay of the wreck in case anything should shift once they began fiddling with the pieces.

After the first couple shots Linda tugged her wrist and pointed. Anna's gaze followed the other diver's finger to the forward section of the wreck. The small movements of their fins had moved through the viscous world and finally reached the frozen flag flying from the ruined cabin doorway. The fabric, mottled black and yellow, possibly partially burned, was waving ever so faintly. The motion had disarranged the original drape, exposing what looked very like a forefinger and thumb.

The two of them began swimming slowly in the direction of the bow. Anna dearly hoped the hand was connected to an arm and the arm to a body with another arm, legs, head and whatnot attached. And she wished she had diving gloves; there was probably going to be slimy bits coming up.

They stopped again, hovering just above and in front of the door.

Linda touched Anna's shoulder, pointed to the wreck and waggled her hand back and forth, reminding Anna that the pieces of the boat were possibly unsteady and could fall, crushing or tapping an unwary diver.

Linda's short blond hair stood out from her head, moving with strange life lent by the sea. Her mouth was distorted and swollen with the froggy humanness shared by the creature from the black lagoon and scuba divers with their mouthpieces in place. Her light blue eyes, crinkled by lines that usually reassured Anna of a life led in sunlight and laughter, were exaggerated by her mask. A slow leak pooled salt water-an ocean of tears-high on her cheeks.

For an instant, no less powerful because short-lived, a cold fear swept through Anna; a child awakening in a nightmare made more real by the light of day.

Anna watched her own hand float up, finger and thumb making the okay sign, letting Linda know she'd gotten the message. The rift between the dimension of Dean Koontz and Jacques Cousteau was healed as quickly as it had formed. The fear was gone.

Rough night, Anna excused it to her self. Overtired.

She kicked once and moved to the segmented hull. At a show of her palm, the universal signal for halt, Linda stayed back. Because of Linda's superior skill in the water, Anna had been glad to abdicate leadership during the diving. When it came to risk taking, she couldn't. Storms, currents and reefs were Linda's nemeses. At present, this tippy, murdered vessel with its one flailing human arm, was Anna's responsibility.

Reaching the top left corner of the cabin, Anna steadied herself on the wreck and looked toward the bow. Keeled over, tilting cabin and deck at a sixty- or seventy-degree angle up from the sandy bottom, the bow was wedged between two upthrusts of coral. From the damage both to the animals and the boat's underside, Anna guessed she had been driven between the coral boulders with a degree of force, enough to shove the bow into the sandy bottom.

Anna shook the boat experimentally. It didn't budge. She pushed it from several more angles without dislodging anything. Partially reassured it wasn't a death trap just waiting to slam shut on her claustrophobic little self, she swam back to the cabin door, to the fingers protruding from the torn fabric. Linda still hung in the water fifteen feet away. A first mate-and captain when Cliff was sick or on vacation-she was good both at the giving and the taking of orders.

Anna removed the camera from its pocket and clicked pictures: north, east, south and west of the bow section and one close-up of the finger-fringed fabric floating in front of her nose. Record made, she returned the camera to its niche and kicked a bit closer to examine the beckoning flesh. "Finger-fringed" was unpleasantly apt. What they'd seen was not a thumb and forefinger but a ring finger and the avulsed half of the middle finger. The yellow was not a sleeve but possibly the torso of a tee shirt peeled from the body by the blast and blown out along the arm. There was a wrist, Anna was relieved to note, and part of a forearm leading back to an anchor of some sort. A body, it was to be hoped. Gently, Anna turned the new-made relic. From the look of it, the arm had belonged to a man. Much of the flesh was burned or excised by the explosion, but the ribbons remaining were coarse-skinned and the few hairs not scorched off were coarse and black.

Bracing herself against the cabin, she reached toward the underwater light at her waist. Head bent toward the hook connecting the flashlight to her buoyancy compensator, she sensed rather than saw darkness descending, an eclipse of the pale watery sun. With a grinding noise that was felt as well as heard the tortured fiberglass fell away beneath her hand. The hulk, steady moments before, rolled with the impetuosity of submerged matter. Under the grinding filling her ears and grating on her bones came Linda's close-mouth scream, a weak mermaid's siren.

Pushing at the environment with hands and flippered feet, Anna scuttled backward in the tradition of octopi but without the grace. The heel of her right foot banged into coral, and the cabin rolled down. Through the silt and particles, through the luminous and shifting green of the sky, a ton of fiberglass, wood and metal moved. White and bottle green, a wall toppling, a twisted and melting cliff-face.

Again Anna kicked. Her right leg didn't move but jerked, a spasm as before sleep. The hull rolled onto her swim fin, trapping it and her toes in a vicelike grip. Bubbles, sand, a fog of minute coral deaths, destroyed her vision. Light and dark remained. Dark was fast falling, the cabin roof closing on the boulder where Anna wiggled, bait on a hook. Panic tickled inside her brain, urging her to rip off the blinding mask, tear away the regulator with its claustrophobic life support. Training shaped panic to fear. Fear escalated to instinct.

The flashlight fell into shadow. The dive knife strapped to Anna's calf found her palm. The blade slid into the top of her fin and with a slash her foot was cut free. She kicked back and up. The cabin rolled, keel looming into view sharp as a harrow, a kaleidoscope of ruin. The hard edge of the still-attached cabin door clawed at Anna's thigh, scraped down over her knee. Ignoring the pain, Anna pushed off the underside of the wreck.

The moment she was free and safe, the movement stopped. Panting, bubbles and noise billowing out of her regulator, mask beginning to fog from internal heat, Anna suffered a horror that this was personal: the insensate, ruined hulk had wanted to kill her. Fear, no less intense because unrealistic, pushed up from her stomach in cold nauseating waves.

Into the glittering cloud of air bubbles came Linda's face, pulled out of human shape by the dive gear. Thoughts of monsters from the black or any other lagoon were gone; for one rare moment Anna was comforted just not to be alone. Her heart slowed, her breathing began to return to normal. The fear was too much, too hard. Then Anna realized she must have coupled the rolling cabin with being trapped in the dark under nearly two hundred feet of ice-cold water nearly ten years before, experienced that fear for this.

As good an explanation as any, she told herself. Evils sufficient unto the day.

With the help of Linda's work-lined face, Anna pulled herself rapidly back together. Linda was signing but Anna's brain was not yet quite right-side up. She made the "okay" with both hands, hoping that was all the answer Linda required. Apparently it was, the agitated finger wiggling and twitching ceased. Bubbles returned to their normal noisy bursts. The women looked down on the offending wreck.

An old hand, Linda hung in the water not moving, weight and buoyancy perfectly balanced. Anna, her weight belt a tad heavy, had to kick gently to maintain. Missing the one fin, she listed slightly.

Yards of beautifully colored, incredibly varied and terribly fragile living coral had been crushed or scraped away. Anna felt the loss with greater sorrow than the loss of whoever belonged to the hairy, yellow-clad arm. She justified her inhumane leanings with the myth that her job inured her to human suffering.

The wreck hadn't completely turned turtle. The coral crevice it wedged itself into during the original descent had stopped it. The top half of the cabin door-the left side, had the boat been upright-was above the coral boulder.

Linda pointed. Down at the bottom, just peeking out of the crush between cabin and coral, was the finger. An image of the Wicked Witch of the East, smashed under Dorothy's house, only her feet protruding, came into Anna's mind, and she half expected to see the finger and the mangled palm to which it was attached shrivel and disappear beneath the fallen boat.

At her elbow, Linda was scribbling on an underwater pad. Finished, she showed Anna: "We go in now?" Anna shook her head and took the notebook.

"I go for ropes. Replace fin. You stay out of boat."

Linda read, then made the okay sign and pointed at Anna's NPS camera. Understanding was established. Linda would continue to record the wreckage. Anna would refurbish her gear and get what was necessary to work safely around the sunken boat.

In the ten minutes it took to return to the Activa, collect what she needed and swim back, the light grew immeasurably better. The sun had jumped high and sudden above the horizon. Some of the extra matter put into suspension by the shifting of the hull had settled out. All in all, with Linda swimming gracefully about snapping pictures of the kind required on any routine accident investigation, Anna was hard pressed to remember the alarums of a quarter of an hour before. Probably the facility to forget was one of the reasons she stayed in the line of work she'd chosen. Looking back, no matter what had actually transpired, it never seemed all that bad. Still, she was shaken. Not by the trapping of her fin, but by the sense she'd suffered that it was intentional. This was something she couldn't afford to think too long on. She purposely wiped the weirdness from her mind and concentrated on what was in front of her.

While she'd been gone the finger had disappeared. Anna mentally tipped her hat to L. Frank Baum. Obviously the man had done his homework.

Linda, good as her word and essentially a cautious woman, had stayed away from the bow section. Several yards from the wedged hull, her back to it, she crouched froglike over a shard of the shattered boat, the camera held four inches from her mask as she framed the shot. Thirty or forty feet out, laden with coiled line, Anna glided toward her.

Movement caught her eye and she looked past Linda. A bubble the size of a beach ball was squeezing out of the cracked keel where the bow had upended when the wreck had shifted. The bubble's elongated shape moved, expanded. It was not clear but filled with roiling sulphurous gray. For an instant Anna's mind froze in wonder. Once before she'd seen a bubble like that. With the speed of thought, the memory came clear. She and Molly, both little girls, had been playing with a length of fuse left over from when their dad, afraid they would collapse and kill somebody, had dynamited unstable caves dug in a sandpit by the local schoolkids. They'd put one end of the fuse in a puddle of water and lit the other. When the fuse burnt to the end, a yellow bubble appeared on the puddle. They popped it and a puff of smoke was released.

The boat was still burning. When it rolled, the flames inside must have found a new source of air and fuel. Dropping the line, Anna kicked hard for the first mate, still oblivious in her concentration. Muted, high-pitched noises reached Anna's ears as she impotently called Linda's name without ungluing her lips from the regulator's mouthpiece.

Intuition or unusually acute hearing brought the other woman's head up, stirring her yellow hair into a mini-nova around her face.

Kicking for all she was worth, Anna pointed. Linda turned to look back. Suspended, weightless, her body rotated with her head. A nightmare sense of slow motion, of trying to run through viscous mud, overtook Anna. A booming-thunder through rain-and the keel of the ship expanded as if it had taken a deep breath. Cracks appeared. Red fire, incongruous forty feet under the ocean, opened, then burst out in gouts of flame. The hull exploded outward, shards of razor-sharp Plexiglas shot like torpedoes in every direction. A bubble of black veined with red blossomed.