Key West Connection (26 page)

It was an affirmation of the things we had left behind; an affirmation of the new lives each of us would have to find. And afterward, we would talk: long, rambling, self-indulgent conversations, telling each other everything. We didn't talk like lovers—nothing about our combined plans and hopes for the future. We talked like best friends. We soothed each other and tried to bolster sagging egos and shattered dreams.

It was harder for me to talk than it was for Lee. I find it difficult to stick more than four words into a sentence, and more than one sentence into a paragraph. I've always been quiet. Not shy, just quiet. My wife used to kid me by calling me Captain Stoic. But finally, with Lee's gentle help, the words started pouring out. When someone you love dies, you first feel outrage, then remorse, then guilt. I had been through the remorse and outrage—nearly a dozen men died in the flare of it. And Lee had helped me reason the guilt away.

So we had worked our way across Florida Bay, up into the Ten Thousand Islands wilderness on the mainland west coast, and then back across open ocean to the Dry Tortugas, and then here, to the Marquesas, working our way along to Key West and the end of the trip. The autumn days were hot and calm; perfect days for slow love and cold beer and talk; golden autumn days.

Golden.

Lee sat on the gunnel of the Boston Whaler, her long legs draping over into the clear water. And when her eyes softened, I leaned and kissed her, tasting the salt on her lips, feeling the warmth of her mix with the warm sea wind that wafted across Fullmoon Cay to the reef over which our little boat was anchored.

“And what about your supper, captain?” She smiled at me impishly. I was close enough to her face to see the little bronze flecks in her blue eyes.

“I've got my sling. I'll go down and shoot a snapper—later.”

“Later?” She smiled and kissed me.

“Later.”

Naked, she stretched back on the mahogany seat of the Whaler, her eyes closed, her arms folded behind her head.

“You're cold from diving.”

“Hum . . . so I see.”

A bottle of coconut oil sat on the little console, warm from its day in the sun. “This might help.” I began to massage it into her skin, enjoying the scent of it, and the vision of this lovely blond woman.

“You seem to be concentrating on limited areas, captain.”

“Certain parts of you look colder than others.”

She opened one eye, squinting at me. “And parts of you look anything but cold.”

I put down the coconut oil and leaned over her, kissing her body, caressing her outstretched legs, feeling her breasts full against me, and then—and then she pushed me away, giggling vampishly. “Your turn to suffer, MacMorgan!”

“What?”

Oh, she made me suffer. With the coconut oil. And her hands. And her lips. And had she made me suffer a minute more, I would have attacked her then and there. But she didn't. Instead, she grabbed one of the yellow Dacor scuba tanks, and her mask and, with a short laugh, jumped into the clear water. And I soon followed.

Beside the reef was a pocket of sand. Iridescent blue-and-green parrot fish scurried away at our approach, and the woman lay back in the sand, motioning for me. And there, three fathoms down, we made slow love. Beneath clear water, experimenting with the new weightlessness and the variations it allowed, we coupled in a stream of bubbles, drifting with the sea. Barracuda looked on, stern as maidenly aunts, and yellow-eyed groupers peered at us strangely from their rocky hideaways. I was filled with my passion for Lee and my love of the sea, but I also felt a sweet-sad ache, because I knew that she would be leaving me upon our return to Key West, and that I would probably never see her again.

 

Afterward, Lee climbed back on the little Whaler to bask in the sun and I took my sling down to the reef alone. I wore no tank. Even after three tours of duty in Nam as a Navy SEAL, I still preferred just mask and fins. No regulator to worry about. No metal fittings to konk you on the back of the head. When I am in the water I love the freedom of unhampered motion. Besides, spearfishing with a tank is one of the most pathetically unfair “sports” imaginable. The poor fish doesn't have a chance. I dove down to the top of the reef, then worked my way along a shelf of coral in about twenty feet of water. Small snapper and yellowtail moved away from me in perfect, orderly sheets, as if one mind controlled them all. I knew exactly what I wanted for supper, and I moved away from the reef to find it, propelling myself along the bottom with long, smooth leg strokes. A big cuda followed me, drifting alongside effortlessly. He was a five-footer, easy, and mossycolored with age. I didn't mind. If he wanted the fish I shot, he was welcome to it. I would just get another.

I was after a nice hogfish, and I finally saw one beneath a sea fan in a clearing of coral sand. At first he was a pallid gray in color, but at my approach he flushed a bright nervous crimson, the black spot at the base of the posterior ray vivid. It was a beautiful fish, about a six-pounder, and I took him cleanly with a shot through the head. He fluttered briefly on the free shaft, then fell still—and that's when I realized something other than the barracuda had been following me.

Attracted by the death vibration—or the earlier love vibrations—a huge open-water mako shark came slashing across the reef, its massive pointed head swinging back and forth as it vectored in on me and the dying hogfish.

Sharks and I are not exactly strangers. You won't meet a SEAL who hasn't had some kind of encounter with one. SEAL—sea, air and land commandos, the toughest of the tough and the roughest of the rough. And we just spend too much time in the water, day and night, to miss. For me, it was a night swim long, long ago on a training mission in the Pacific, one of those freak occurrences: a big dusky shark that wasn't supposed to be in those waters, and sure as hell wasn't supposed to attack. He left me with 148 stitches in my side and a new nickname. It was some scar. But strangely, Lee Johnson had come to be fascinated by it, paying it special, tender attention in our lovemaking. At any rate, I didn't want or need any more scars. I already had more than my share.

That mako was a beautiful creature: bright blue and then cobalt; a massive ten or eleven feet in length and probably weighing half a ton. The smaller species of shark don't bother me. They really don't. You learn to live with them. Besides, their instincts tell them to eat fish, not people. Believe me, if sharks ever got a taste for human flesh, there wouldn't be a saltwater beach on earth that was safe. But this mako was big enough to break all the rules.

The reef that had been alive with fish was suddenly still. They knew. This was more than just another big shark—this was a big shark feeding. He came toward me, his head slicing back and forth like a radar antenna. From the leg sheath, I drew my Randall attack-survival knife—the good-luck charm that had saved my life and had taken others more than once. But against this fish, it would be no more lethal than a bee sting. I drew it only as a prod. If it decided on me as supper, I could only try to jab its pointed snout and hope to scare it away.

I had been down a long time and was almost out of air. But I couldn't afford to try to surface. Sharks like dangling arms and legs. I thought about Lee back on the little Whaler, and I prayed that she wouldn't choose this moment to dive in and cool off. I watched the mako drawing closer and closer. He looked like a two-man mini-sub with fins and dead yellow eyes. I clung to a chunk of staghorn coral, and when he passed me the first time, I felt my legs drawing up behind me, swept along in his powerful wake. He had been close enough to take me in a bite.

But this mako, big as he was, had no interest in breaking the rules this day. He circled me once more, and still I hung motionless. Then, in one lightning swoop, he opened his brutish jumble of teeth, took up the hogfish, shook the spear free, then bolted back toward the reef, his head still jerking, his tiny brain still fixed on feeding. I didn't give him a moment to reconsider.

I surfaced on the side of the Whaler away from the reef and jumped into the boat with one kick of my Dacor TX-1000 Competition Class fins. Lee was in tears, still naked, but trembling.

“God, Dusky, I saw him coming . . . I kept screaming at you, but you never . . . ”

She fell against me, crying.

As I started the Whaler and powered us back to my cruiser, Lee, wrapped in a blanket, leaned against me. I made jokes; I got her laughing. And I waited for the fear to catch up with me. That's the way it happens when you've had a close call—the fear doesn't come until later.

But it never arrived. Why? I wondered. And then I thought I knew: compared with the murders of my family and my best friend at the hands of the drug-running pirates who will forever operate in the Florida Keys, death in the grips of a creature so magnificent as that mako seemed pure and compelling.

My sleek charterboat was beautiful in that strange afternoon light. It is painted a deep night blue, with the words
painted in small white script on the transom. It looked black against the soft blue of calm sea and against the backdrop of the island's sweeping white beach. We puttered up and I tethered the Whaler off on a long line, tossed out a small stern anchor, and then climbed aboard to receive the second shock of the day. We were not alone on the boat.

A gnomelike man stood on the deck. Gifford Remus. Old as he was, he looked at me with the same submissive uneasiness as always; the face of a little kid in the audience of some idolized big brother. And what he held in his gnarled hands brought all the saffron omens of sunset into sharp focus.

He smiled a wondrous smile, eyes wide, then held out a six-foot length of old Spanish chain.

It was made of pure gold.