The frogmen (11 page)

For a moment they all acted like kids, swimming around, touching each other, making wild gestures, eye-smiling, frowning to show their puzzlement.

At last Amos held up four fingers and jabbed a finger at each of them.

Neither Max nor John had seen Reeder.

Amos shrugged and pointed in the direction of the ledge.

The debris in the water was slowly settling to the bottom, and the light was growing brighter as they went in under the ledge. Amos showed them the hole, pointing out the moray, which seemed unaffected by the mine blast.

Max swam in too close to the eel and Amos pulled at his leg. Max turned, frowning, and then moved in again.

Amos wondered as he pulled at him again if Max knew how dangerous these things were. They weren't as bad as sharks or barracuda, but a moray this size could give you a rough time, mainly because when they bit you they hung on, thrashing around until they tore a chunk out of you.

Max pulled away from Amos, scowling at him, and approached the eel again.

Amos was horrified to see him shove his hand straight into the moray's face.

The eel lunged and, in a beautiful, smooth movement, Max withdrew his hand, the eel following. With his other hand he caught the moray just behind the head.

The moray coiled around Max's arm and head,

the mottled, slimy-looking body, at least six feet long and very powerful, constricting wherever it got a grip.

A coil of the body slid down his face, wiping the regulator out of his mouth, and slipped around his throat, the muscles rippling in cords as it seemed to pulse strength into them.

With his free hand, Max put the regulator back into his mouth. Then he pushed the moray's head straight away from him until, at arm's length, the eel uncoiled and fell away, the body moving in slow spasms.

Max turned it loose, and the eel drifted down, coiling slowly, and draped itself over a large chunk of grayish brain coral.

Amos gave him a salute and swam back to the hole. Now he was sure he could see a dim patch of light at the other end.

He motioned to Max and John that he was going in and handed John the free end of his life line. Then he moved on, propelling himself only with his fins, feeling his way with gloved hands.

It was spooky in there. Tendrils of sea growth streamed across his face mask, seeming to clutch him. There were soft, pulpy things under his hands.

As Amos came closer to the light, he grew more cautious. He was not more than ten feet below the surface, and he did not want to come swimming out into some open pool where he would be visible to anyone on the bank.

He went ahead very slowly, colors glowing all

around him now, and he could see beautiful little reef fish and sea spiders.

The tunnel ended, and Amos, staying inside it, saw what seemed to be a large pool of water, so big he could barely make out the rock boundary on the far side.

Looking up at the mirrorlike surface, he was surprised and puzzled by an area of it that was being broken regularly by something falling into the water.

It was not rain; the light was that of full sunlight now, and yet he could hear the same small, dry sound that rain made.

As Amos turned from side to side he noticed that a column of brilliant light plunged into the pool at about the center and spread out in all directions. Nowhere else in the pool was the light as strong.

The shaft of light came into the pool at the place where the mirror was being broken, and Amos began to wonder whether there was something over the pool with a hole in it. A hole through which rain water was still dripping although the squall had passed.

He moved slowly out of the tunnel and, staying close to the rock wall, eased himself up to the surface.

For a moment the water on his face mask blurred everything, but when it cleared he saw a marvelous thing.

He was in an enormous cave hollowed out inside

the lava. In some places the roof of the cave was ten feet above him, in others only a few inches.

The dripping was rain water falling from the edges of a small, round hole in the roof of the cave —a hole that had probably been made by the explosion of gases in molten lava a million years ago.

Only the area around the hole was brightly lit by sunlight. The rest of the cave was dim, but he could see a small, shelving, pebbly beach on the far side, and above this beach the rock ceiling was at least ten feet high.

Amos signaled on the life line for John to follow him, and when he felt the line grow slack he drew it in, coiling it.

John's eyes looked almost wild as he stared around under the water before surfacing.

Amos reached for the life line at John's belt and signaled for Max, who emerged from the tunnel like some huge torpedo.

They swam together underwater across the pool toward the beach. Amos guided them away from the strong column of light below the hole.

As they swam, John pointed at a lobster sitting among some rocks hardly five feet below them.

Crawling onto the wet gravel of the beach, they pushed the masks up and dropped the regulators.

"Man," Max said softly. "This is beautiful."

"What about at high tide?" John asked. "Maybe it fills up with water."

Amos looked slowly around, noticing now a whitish band of salt, about three feet above the water level,

running all the way around the walls of the cave. "Maybe that's the high-tide mark," he said. "If it is, we're in business."

Max said, "I've lived in worse places than this. We can spend the night here. Sleep on the beach like people. Let's get the stuff."

"We'd better find Reeder first," Amos said. "That dummy!"

John's voice was low and shocked. "Hey," he said, "you don't suppose he ran into a mine?"

"How?" Amos demanded. "He's not that stupid."

"Something blew a mine," John said. "They might be camouflaged, or under the sand. He might not even have seen the thing."

"We'd better go look for him," Amos said.

"They could be magnetics," John said. "Reeder had enough gear on his belt to arm a magnetic."

"He jumped in too close to the boat," Amos said. "I thought he'd hurt himself, but he seemed okay when I checked him. But now that I think back, he wasn't swimming." Amos looked over at John and Max. "Maybe he couldn't, so he just sank straight to the bottom. Maybe he was looking for us. Maybe he could only crawl. . . and hit one."

"Then what's to look for?" John asked quietly.

Amos shrugged and pulled his mask down. "We'll start at the gear, where we came down, and fan out. If you see a mine, stay away from it."

In the ocean again, they swam back to the gray sacks of supplies and then started from the wall, moving out into the channel.

Amos had not gone twenty feet before he saw it, lying as though it had been carefully placed there, in the branches of a huge fan coral.

Motioning to John and Max, he swam down to the coral.

The scuba was complete and undamaged. Amos lifted it out of the coral, noticing that the weight belt had been deliberately buckled to the pack harness.

As John and Max joined him, Amos held up the compass attached to the belt. Reeder had been assigned to bring that down.

The three hung there a moment, staling at the gear, and then Amos made a slicing motion across his throat and pointed back toward their supplies.

It was tiring work, but at last they had all the sacks inside the cave. As Amos came up with the last one and pushed it out on the beach, he looked around. "That it?"

John counted the sacks. "Yeah. Let's break out some water."

"Reeder's scuba," Max said. "I left it on that piece of brain coral. With my eel."

As he started back into the water, Amos said, "Don't waste the air, Max. We'll get it next trip."

John passed the jug of drinking water around and they all drank.

At last Amos said, "There's no use looking for Reeder any more. He never came down."

"What'd he do?" Max asked. "Walk on the water? He sure thought he could."

"When I went over the side I saw a line trailing from the bow," Amos told them. "I thought it was just an Irish pennant, but now I'm pretty sure Reeder rigged it so he could grab it and get back aboard. Look how careful he was to sink his scuba so Tanaka wouldn't see it."

"It didn't do him much good," John said. "That close in, with people watching, Tanaka couldn't let him stay aboard long. Tanaka had a gun, you know."

"Did he?" Max asked.

"Hidden with the coding board. Right where you said, Amos. Under the floor boards. And, you know something? It was a Japanese pistol."

"Why not?" Amos asked. "Well, as far as we're concerned, that's that. Have you still got the coding board, John?"

"Right here." John patted one of the sacks.

"That was a good move," Amos said. "No matter who Tanaka is, he's got to come back to get that board." He looked over at Max. "So let's get on with it. Max, why don't you and I take the first cruise . . T

"Hold it," John said. "Where'd our theory go? If Reeder didn't set off that mine, what did?"

"We don't even know it was a mine," Amos said.

"If the Japanese flyboys are like some of the ones I know," Max said, "one of them might have pulled the wrong lever and instead of dropping his wheels, dropped a bomb."

"Or, they might have been bore-sighting a gun somewhere," Amos said.

"It could've been a torpedo," John said. "That's what they sound like. And feel like. But I still think it was a mine."

"Then what blew it?" Max asked.

John laughed. "Remember Hingman? He didn't amuse me often, but when he said mines sometimes went off just to be mischievous, it tickled me."

"Whatever," Amos said. "I checked the time soon after it went off, and Tanaka couldn't have been anywhere near it. He was at least two or three miles into the lagoon."

Amos slung his gear on and stood up. "Maybe somebody could do a little light housekeeping while Max and I are gone."

"And what would you gentlemen like for dinner?" John asked. "I have delicious K-rations or delicious K-rations."

"Check us for magnetic before you start cooking anything delicious," Amos told him. "We want to come back, you know."

As John checked all the metal they were carrying to make sure that none of it was ferrous, Amos said to Max, "We'll use that big piece of brain coral for a point of departure. You take the lagoon side, angling out about ten degrees. I'll take the seaward side. Go out half an hour and then come back, inside your out line."

"Okay. If I find a mine, you want me to bring it back in here?"

"Splendid idea," John said. "We need a bigger hole in the ceiling than that little tiling."

Amos grinned. "Just mark it, Max, and leave it alone. I don't think we ought to fiddle with them until we've got a pretty good idea of what makes them work."

"I'm way ahead of you," Max said.

The mines were standing as though in ranks for as far as Amos could see across the channel.

They were not metal balls, but cylinders, with flat tops, which Amos could see had been welded on. They stood upright on the bottom, not moving in the currents of tide and waves.

He hovered above one of them in the clear water, studying it.

There were four Hertz horns set into the top plate. Seaweed was growing on them, waving slowly back and forth with the slow current. There seemed to be nothing unusual about the horns; he had seen many like them in Death Row.

A square metal box was also set into the top, and Amos assumed that it was a part of the firing mechanism.

He could see no other attachments, and as he swam on out into the channel, he wondered what kept the mines on the bottom, for he could see no anchor or cable.

He estimated that they were set about fifty feet apart. He could see only two rows of them but realized that there could be more beyond the range of his vision.

They had been carefully laid, each one on a patch of sand, none of them tilted by rocks or coral. He guessed that they had been put down by divers.

Keeping on a due-north course he swam slowly above them, growing so used to seeing them that they became like cracks in a sidewalk.

And then one was missing.

The explosion had scooped out a fifty-foot-wide dish in the bottom, flinging rocks and coral out to the edge of it.

Amos swam deeper into the dish, studying the bottom carefully.

The gun looked very black against the white sand. He could see nothing attached to it—no wire or lever. He swam down until he saw the words u. s. navy engraved along the barrel.

It was a standard-issue, .45 Colt semi-automatic pistol.

It had not been there long, for there was no oxidation. Working the slide, he caught the round in his

hand and then took out the clip and counted the remaining rounds. Only one was missing. He put the cartridges back into the clip, slipped it in place, and hooked the gun to his belt with the ring in the butt.

A little farther along he saw the twisted propeller shaft, the propeller and shaft log still attached to it. Beyond that was the diesel engine, tools and gear scattered around it.

The radio lay almost at the edge of the dish on the far side.

There were no remnants of humans, and when he looked up he could see nothing floating in the water above him.

Amos turned slowly and headed back, staying much farther away from the mines now that the pistol hung at his belt.

As he neared the lava wall and turned toward the cave entrance, the light began to fade. For a moment he thought it must be the sun setting, but it was much too early for that. Another rain squall up there, he thought, hoping John would catch some of it as it fell through the hole in the ceiling.

At the first sound of rain on the surface, he glanced up and saw the debris floating in the water. Sacks of copra, almost waterlogged, moved sluggishly in the waves. There was a piece of canvas, a sail, half unfurled. There were shattered bits of timber and planking. He recognized one of the locker doors.

Then something white dangling down into the water caught his eye.