Hawke (28 page)

“Suit yourself, then.”

She started with his shoulder but soon moved to his chest and then to his belly. She immediately noticed a marked increase in his breathing rate.

“Sorry to bother you. I wonder if you would mind pulling down your bathing suit?” she asked, brushing the tips of her white, coral-tipped breasts across the deeply tanned skin of his belly.

“My bathing suit?”

“Here, I’ll help you.”

She took the bow of little white strings that held up his navy blue bathing suit in her teeth and pulled them apart.

“There you go,” she said. “Now, will you please pull it down?”

“Why should I do that?”

“Because you’re my lunch and you’re covering up my favorite part. The
piece de résistance.”

He pulled both knees to his chest, lifted himself off the towel, and removed the bathing suit in one motion.

“Well done,” she said.

“Happy now?” he said.

“Oh my, that does look good,” Vicky whispered in his ear, and then her lips were everywhere, causing him to arch his back upwards involuntarily as he felt her mouth close around him.

They made love there on the beach with the blind pig swimming to and fro in the blue sea, chasing the apples and oranges. Vicky was astride him, riding, rocking, her hair matted to her forehead with the heat of both sun and passion, her eyes locked on his right up until the instant when she cried out and arched her back, raising her arms to the sky with both hands outstretched, reaching for something she’d never quite touched until this very moment.

She lay in his arms for a time, her head on his chest, listening to his heart pumping, feeling him fall slowly away from inside her and drift down into what she hoped was the bliss of a peaceful dream.

He began to snore softly. She got up and put on her bikini, looking down at him, smiling. The she dropped to her knees once more and stroked the damp black ringlets of hair on his chest.

“Alex Hawke,” she whispered to him, “you can’t hear me, but you know what I wish more than anything? I wish I’d become a surgeon instead of what I am. I wish I could take a little scalpel inside that brain of yours and find the exact little furrow of gray matter where whatever hurts you is hiding. Snip, snip, snip, I would cut it out. And you’d never have those terrible dreams, ever again.”

She sat up and brushed the hair back from her eyes. She sucked deep gulps of tangy air deep into her lungs, feeling totally invigorated, bristling with sharp, kinetic energy. She got to her feet and stood there, shielding her eyes with her hand, scanning the blue horizon. A flock of white seabirds was circling the pretty little island of pines beyond the channel.

Pine Cay, Alex had called it. It couldn’t be more than a mile from where she stood. She was a strong swimmer. A competitive swimmer. She could swim across and explore the pine forest while Alex slept. She could probably be over and back before he woke up, he was sleeping so soundly. The water was such a lovely shade of light blue it seemed to be begging her to plunge in.

She swam out toward the delicious river of dark blue that ran between the two islands.

Alex had no idea how long he’d been asleep.

He sat up with a start, realizing Vicky was no longer beside him. He looked around, but didn’t see her swimming or anywhere along the deserted beach.

He called out her name. No answer.

He leapt to his feet and ran along the line of scrub palms. Maybe she went exploring. He called her name repeatedly, thinking, she’s barefoot. Why would she go back among the rough and prickly palms?

His heart started pounding. That’s when he heard something that sent an arrow of fear through his heart.

Alex…Alex…Alex!

Faint. And coming from the sea.

He ran to the water’s edge, desperately scanning the rolling waves for a sight of her. There. A faint smudge. It had to be Vicky. She was halfway across the pass between the two islands! In the very middle of the vicious riptide rushing toward the open sea!

He made a running dive and started swimming as hard as he could, cursing himself furiously for not warning her about the current. Stupid! He never dreamt that she’d go out that far, but remembered how enchanted she was with the pine-forested island. That had to be it. She’d decided to swim over and—

He stopped swimming and raised his head. He could barely make out the dim shape that had to be her.

No…no…no…

Her voice was weaker now, a faint
no
repeated over and over. She was telling him to stop. Telling him the current would only take him as well. He plowed ahead another fifty yards, feeling the swift pull of the running tide taking him into its grip.

He swam harder. He was strong. Stronger than this bloody current that was stealing Vicky away from him. He swam until the muscles in his legs and arms were burning and then he swam harder still.

Another look. There. She was much farther away now. He saw her go under. Then surface again. He swam toward her, heedless of the wicked pull of the water. Raised his head, gasping for air. A sick, hollow feeling began to steal its way inside him. For every ten yards of progress he gained, she was being swept away another thirty.

He plowed forward, refusing to acknowledge it was hopeless now, unwilling to give up. He swam another thirty yards, feeling himself right on the periphery of where the rip was strongest. He raised his eyes, stinging with a mixture of tears and salt, and looked again.

“I love you!” he cried out, praying she might yet be able to hear him.

He saw her just that one last time, briefly, being pulled past Pine Cay now, and then he saw her go under. Waited. Fought the tide. Waited for that dear little head to surface, please, just once more and maybe he could get to—somehow get to—God—just to see her again…

He knew then that she was gone. Simply. Irrevocably. Gone.

He lifted his face to the heavens and screamed mercilessly at God.

*   *   *

Alex Hawke turned and swam as hard as he could for
Kestrel
. The edges of the rip had him, fought him, but not hard enough to overcome his rage. In minutes, he was climbing aboard the sloop. He ducked down through the companionway to the small navigation station.

There was a satellite phone hanging above the notebook computer with the GPS system.

Ambrose was on the sat phone speed dial.

He picked up on the first ring.

“I need immediate help,” Alex said, gasping for breath. “Immediate! I need our main launch in the water headed out the cut between Hog Island and Pine Cay. At least two divers aboard. I need you to call the Bahamas Air-Sea Rescue Command at Harbor Island. Tell them we need search-and-rescue choppers out here now.”

“Alex. Calm down. What’s going on?”

“It’s Vicky, goddammit.”

“What’s wrong, Alex?”

“She’s gone. Swept out in the riptide. I don’t know! Maybe we can save her! Christ, just get some bloody help out here, all right?”

“We’re coming,” Ambrose said, and hung up.

Alex scrambled back up on deck and hoisted the main and the jib. He weighed his anchor and headed the sloop out into the cut, his eyes fixed on the area where time and speed of current might have put her since he last saw her.

His eyes were burning. He was praying for that little brown smudge he’d last seen drifting away from him.

Praying to see it again. Simply praying for it to still exist.

Reel Thing,
a brand-new fifty-foot Viking sport-fishing boat, was swinging on her anchor in the dark of a small cove. It was a hot moonless night, and only the lights of a few dim stars were visible. The cabin lights were all off below and above decks, and the sounds of the Allman Brothers came softly from speakers mounted throughout the boat.

The owner, Red Wallace, and his best fishing buddy, Bobby Fesmire, were sitting in the stern drinking Budweiser in the dark. Red was the biggest Ford dealer in South Florida. Bobby was his sales manager. Red and Bobby went way back. They’d gone to Florida at Gainesville together, pledged Kappa Alpha together, and played on the national championship Gator football team together. Both of them still wore their big gold NCAA rings with all the diamonds on their pinky fingers.

They took this little fishing trip to the Exumas as often as they could, which was once every two or three months. Sometimes they took clients so they could write it off, most often they’d bag the clients so it was just the two of them.

Tonight, they’d moored the boat in a small cove, ringed with mangroves. The wind was out of the east, so
Reel Thing
had her stern toward the small opening to the channel. Not that there was anything to see, but it gave them a view of the heat lightning blooming on the horizon.

“Know what heat lightnin’ is, Bobby?” Red asked.

“Yeah. Lightnin’ that comes from heat.”

“No, it ain’t. It’s ordinary lightnin’ comes from so far away, you can’t see nothin’ but the reflection of it. Ain’t no such thing as heat lightnin’.”

“Why the hell d’you bring it up then?”

“Just tryin’ to educate your dumb ass, is all.”

“I ain’t so dumb.”

“Only guy I ever knew saw a family reunion as a chance to meet girls.”

“You sayin’ it ain’t?”

“Bobby, we had a class of five hundred and thirty-seven seniors graduate.”

“Yeah?”

“You did not graduate in the top five hundred and thirty-six.”

“And your point is? Grades don’t mean nothin’ in my book. Look at us. We’re doing pretty damn good, I’d say. Couple of dumbass crackers sitting on top of the whole damn world. Look at that ring. What’s it say?”

“NCAA National Champions.”

“Bet your ass.”

Earlier that afternoon, Bobby and Red had given up on marlin fishing and found a little cove to put up for the night. At sunset they’d sat out on deck, drinking beer and casting into the mangroves. Didn’t hook a snook or any other kind of damn fish for an hour or so and gave up when it got too dark to see.

They had two big sirloins sitting out on the counter down in the galley but they’d pretty much forgotten about them. They’d wolfed down some boiled shrimp earlier. Good shrimp, too, from the Publix supermarket down the street from the Bahia Mar Marina in Lauderdale.

Red and Bobby had been down here scouring the Exumas and Bahamas for fish for about ten days. Red had been wearing the same T-shirt every day. It said, “My Drinking Crew Has a Fishing Problem.”

That sentiment pretty much summed up the entire voyage. They hadn’t caught a hell of a lot of marlin, but then again, as Red had often pointed out, they hadn’t caught a hell of a lot of hell from their wives either.

Red, who was sitting in the fighting chair on the stern, took a big swig of his Bud and said, “Bobby, lemme ask you another goddamn question. How many fish we catch this week? Total.”

“Three,” Bobby said. “Maybe.”

“And how many beers you reckon we’ve had all week?”

“Hundreds. Maybe a hundred and fifty.”

“So, let’s go with a hundred and fifty. Now let me ask you another question. How many times does three go into a hundred and fifty?”

“Shit, I dunno. What do you think I am? A human calculator?” Bobby burped deeply and tossed his empty over his shoulder.

“Hell, Bobby, it ain’t like I’m asking you to divide goddamn Roman numerals! It ain’t rocket surgery! It’s simple damn arithmetic. You’re a car salesman. You ought to be able to do the calculation. Three goes into one-fifty, lemme see now, fifty times.”

“Sounds about right.”

“My point is, we’ve achieved about fifty-to-one beer-to-fish ratio. And I think that’s pretty goddamn good, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering the fact that I like Budweiser a hell of a lot better than I like fish. I’m going to tell you a secret I’ve never told anybody else. I can’t stand the taste of fish. Hate it. You ever tell my wife, Kathy, that, I’ll whup your sorry ass.”

“Well, that’s good, Red, that you don’t like ’em,” Bobby said. “ ’Cause if them damn helicopters and search-and-rescue boats are back here in the morning, your chances of catching any marlin’ll be about the same as they were today. Shitty.”

“I was monitoring channel sixteen earlier, up on the flybridge. I think they gave up on whoever or whatever was missing out there. We should be all right for tomorrow.”

“Maybe.”

“I will eat a tuna fish sandwich,” Red allowed after a long silence. “Long as it’s got a lot of mayo. Mayo I can eat out of the jar.”

“Hell, I’ve seen you do it.”

“How many times America save France’s ass, Bobby?”

“Least twice. And what’d they ever do for us?”

“That’s my point. The frogs invented mayo. In my book that just about evens things up.”

“Good point.”

“Hell, Bobby, I’d eat a mud sandwich, you put enough mayo on it. Hey. You hungry?”

“Could be. You want, I’ll go put that cow meat on the griddle?”

“I could eat—damn, it’s late—what the hell time is it?”

“Gotta be getting close to midnight,” Bobby said. “You want yours rare or—holy goddamn Christ! Red, what the hell is that?”

“Hell is what?”

“Look out there in the channel! Off to starboard. See it? Looks like the whole damn ocean is exploding!”

Red leapt out of his fishing chair and ran to the stern rail. Bobby was right. Something was going on out there. “Sonofabitch! Hand me them damn binocs, Bobby! Hanging right there by the tuna tower ladder.”

Red put the binocs to his eyes and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The sea was exploding. About a thousand yards off the
Reel Thing
’s stern, out in the middle of the dark deep channel.

“Shitfire, Red! Lemme see.”

He handed Bobby the binoculars.

“Jesus,” Bobby said. “What is it, Red?”

“Whale? How the hell do I know? What am I, a goddamn oceanographer?”

A huge mound of boiling white water was growing in the midst of the inky waves of the channel. It became a mushroom shape, rising and growing, and then the roiling sea did explode and a massive sharp-edged black snout emerged, surging majestically into the midnight sky at a forty-five-degree angle. Black and white seawater was pouring off her sleek dark sides in sheets.

“Well, I’ll be damned, Bobby,” Red said, passing him the binocs just as the strangely shaped hull finally broke the surface.

“A goddamn living breathing submarine!” Bobby said.

Red looked at it, shaking his head in wonder.

“You ever seen a submarine look like that, Bobby?”

“I ain’t never seen a goddamn thing looked like that. Sweet Jesus. Looks more like a UFO than a submarine.”

The thing was still rising at an impossible angle. Then the triangular-shaped bow came crashing down into the boiling sea and the bizarre craft began a slow turn toward one of the many islands on either side of the channel.

Red couldn’t believe his eyes. The hull was in the shape of a giant delta wing and what looked like some kind of weird conning tower was now rising from the apex of the two hulls. The sub was literally as broad abeam as an aircraft carrier.

“That’s the biggest, craziest-looking damn submarine I’ve ever seen,” Red said. “Hell, it looks like one of them stealth bombers and it’s as big as a goddamn battleship!”

“It ain’t natural-lookin’, Red,” Bobby said, staring at it. “Something spooky about it. Like it’s from goddamn Mars or something.”

“Shitfire. Aliens in submarines,” Red said. “What’s next?”

“Yeah. You always wondering ’bout flying saucers. Well, maybe here’s your goddamn answer!”

Water broke over the huge sub’s bow in great white torrents, and, with the binocs, Red and Bobby could make out the silhouettes of three small figures appear atop the now fully exposed conning tower. Someone raised a fluttering flag to the top of a tall post capped by a red light.

A powerful searchlight on the sub’s portside was switched on and swept the sea immediately around the sub. Just when the broad white beam was about to reach the opening to the little cove where
Reel Thing
was moored, it stopped and started back the other way. Deep in the cove, they would be pretty hard to see anyway.

“Look at the flag. It ain’t Russian, is it, Red?” Bobby asked. “I mean, it is one of ours, right?”

Red had the binocs trained on the conning tower.

“Naw, it ain’t Russian,” Red said, studying the flag. “Then again, it ain’t American either.”

“Well, what then? Mars?”

“I seen that flag around here before. I just don’t exactly remember which one it is. Jamaica?”

Bobby spewed beer all over the deck, he was laughing so hard. “Jamaica? Jamaica! They ain’t got any damn submarines in Jamaica, Red.”

“Well, you’re so smart, go down in the cabin and bring me up that atlas. We’ll look her up. Use a flashlight. And turn off that damn stereo, too. Maybe we’re not supposed to be seeing this.”

Bobby went below to get the book and Red stood staring at the sub, transfixed by it. He knew subs were down here in the Caribbean; hell, they were everywhere. But he’d never dreamed of eyeballing one up so close. Especially such an otherworldly machine.

The sub’s searchlight flashed three times, two short and then one long. Then it was extinguished. Some kind of signal? Had to be.

In the last long flash of the searchlight, he’d seen three people come out of the woods on one of the little islands, just to the west. They were dragging a big inflatable across the beach, with an out-board on the back. Red saw them put it in the water. Then he heard the engine sputter and start, and then the raft was moving at high speed toward the submarine.

Drug deal. Goddamn drug deal. Colombians, probably. Shit, he should get on the radio and call the Coast Guard. It was a good thing that searchlight hadn’t spotted them. But what if it was some kind of naval exercises thing? Top secret experimental shit. A joint U.S. war games thing with some allied country. Hell, where was Bobby with that atlas?

“It’s Cuban,” Bobby said, coming out of the dark cabin. He had the book in his hand. “I looked it up.”

“Cuban?” Red said. “Cubans ain’t got any goddamn submarines.”

“Yeah, well they do now. Look on page sixty-two,” Bobby said, handing Red the book and the flashlight. Before Red could make a move, Bobby started climbing like a drunken monkey up the ladder of the tuna tower.

“Bobby, goddamn you! What the hell you doin’? Come on back down here!”

Bobby, upon reaching the top of the tower and laughing like a madman, turned on the powerful spotlight and aimed it right at the submarine’s conning tower.

“Jesus Christ, Bobby! They’ll see us!”

“See the flag?” Bobby shouted down. “Now turn to page sixty-two and look at the flag. Then tell me it ain’t Cuban!”

Suddenly, the sub’s searchlight flashed on again. This time it didn’t stop short of the
Reel Thing.

Red put his hand up to his eyes. The light was blinding. He didn’t know what the hell was going on but he did know one thing. He was getting his brand-new goddamn fifty-footer the hell out of there. Colombians and Cubans didn’t much care for Americans and vice versa. He had a twelve-gauge Remington above his bunk, but the rusty old pump action wouldn’t do much against a goddamn giant submarine.

He ran inside the darkened cabin and cranked up the twin five-hundred-horsepower Cummins diesels. Then he got on the radio to Bobby up on the tower.

“Bobby, now you listen to me. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but something tells me we ought to skedaddle on out of here on the double. You get your ass down on the bow and get that anchor aboard. Right now. You hear me?”

In five minutes, Bobby had hauled the anchor aboard. Red went back on the stern and looked for the sub, but they’d turned the searchlight out and all he could see was blackness. Shit. Were they just waiting for him to come out?

Back at the wheel, he flipped on the flashlight and looked at his chart. He’d keep all his running and navigation lights off, run out of the cove fast as he could, put her hard over to port, and head for open sea. Full throttle. He wanted as much water between him and that damn sub as he could get.

Reel Thing
was capable of a top speed of thirty-five knots. Once safely outside the cove, Red leaned hard on the throttles and headed for the wide open spaces.

Man, what an adventure, he thought, popping a Bud. He turned on his radar, fishfinder, and GPS and was comforted by the green dials lighting up and showing his position and speed. He looked for a blip of the sub on the radar screen. Nothing.