Barracuda Page 10

  Bill looked at Bob in bewilderment and shrugged. Bob unclipped his wreck reel from his weight belt, pushed the brass clip through a porthole, snapped it back onto the line, and pulled it taut. He gave his brother the okay signal, and Bill turned his flashlight on.

  The first four-foot section into the hatchway was littered with an assortment of debris hanging like stalagmites from the ceiling. Bill shone his light up at the ruins and dove under the entanglements lest he be snared. Bob followed carefully as he played out line from his reel. Bill swam through two compartments congested with dangling wires and cables until he reached the third. This compartment wasn’t draped with overhanging debris and spread out into a huge corridor. Bill’s light danced off the walls and floor, which were covered in rich colorful soft corals. Nature’s very own mural of sea life was displayed before him.

  Bill turned to see that his brother didn’t get caught up in the cobweb of cables. Bob was right behind like a good dive buddy. The pair dove down stairwells to lower levels, stopping only to tie a bandana around some interesting piece of war machinery.

  The forward section of the carrier also housed the bow torpedo room. Bill was frenetic, attaching Renegade rags to live bombs everywhere. Bob was uneasy with his brother touching these explosive devices that were corroding before their very eyes. Checking his dive computer, he realized that they had only eight minutes to reach the surface, otherwise they would go into decompression mode.

  He tapped Bill on the arm, pointed to his computer, and gave the diver up sign. Bill nodded in the affirmative, and the pair retraced their steps out of the various compartments. Bill was amazed at the immense size of the interior of the carrier, but apprehensive that there were no ways in or out except through the hatchway they had entered.

  Bob was doing a fine job of reeling them back toward the safety of the hatchway out from this historic but deadly tomb. Suddenly, Bill grabbed his brother’s fin and pointed to the left corner of a massive room. The pair swam over to what appeared to be a huge nest. Gigantic girders, lockers, and machinery were arranged in a wide circle. In the middle of the circle was a mammoth pile of fish bones and gigantic empty eggshells. They knelt down on the floor, looking at the strange fabrication before them.

  Bill looked at Bob, who had a quizzical look on his face. Then as if in slow motion, Bob’s eyes widened to the size of hubcaps. Bill saw a bright flash of silver zoom past. His flashlight beam mirrored off the silver with such intensity that he was temporarily blinded. The silver bullet rocketed between him and Bob, and Bill was stunned by its speed and brightness.

  Bill turned his flashlight off while he once again tried to adjust his eyes to the dark. Once his vision cleared, he saw that Bob was still kneeling across from him. Bill turned on his light and motioned to his brother to lead the way out. Bob didn’t respond, and his hands dangled at his sides at an odd angle. Since the bright flash had blinded him, Bill was seeing everything in slow motion as his sight gradually returned. Still, there was no response from Bob, so Bill did the universal diver attention action by flashing the beam of his flashlight back and forth. Again, there was no reaction, so Bill played the beam toward his brother’s face.

  He shrieked a garbled scream that made his regulator fly out of his mouth. His brother’s head was missing! A steady stream of dark fluid leaked out of the top of Bob’s torso like smoke from a freshly extinguished candle. When Bill’s light beam illuminated the liquid, it reflected a crimson color. Bill continued to stare at the grotesque figure that knelt where his brother had been just moments before. His cries made him swallow mouthfuls of water, and he began to gag on the salty brine.

  In his panic to replace his mouthpiece, Bill dropped his flashlight. With the regulator dolling out mouthfuls of precious air, he made a mad dash to swim out of the house of horrors. He swam over Bob’s still-kneeling torso and raced back into the previous compartment. Without the wreck reel or his dive light, however, the hysterical diver swam straight into a spider web of pendulous cables. He was caught in the trellis of wires, and in his panicky state, spiraled into further distress. Soon he was corkscrewed into place, suspended from the ceiling in an impossible maze of unforgiving circuitry.

  ***

  James woke the next day, looked at his dive watch, and saw that it was nearly ten o’clock in the morning. The sun was shining, just as it always did in this tropical paradise, and there were few signs of the devastating storm of the day before except for the two waterlogged men in the shack.

  He could hear the doctor breathing heavily, so he decided to let the man sleep while he took a look around. Inside the shack were a few items that would come in handy—pots, pans, fishing line, and hooks. There was also a large rain barrel hooked up with PVC piping that ran off the roof gutters. The barrel was nearly half full with fresh water. James was elated. With water and fishing gear, they could hold out for weeks until a search party found them.

  The duo had slept on the cramped floor, but the shack was not equipped for sleeping. James figured he could make some bedding out of palm fronds, and since it rarely rained, the two would sleep under the stars at night. His brain was working in overdrive as he looked around “Coney Island” for useful things.

  “James, where are you? James, where are you?”

  “I’m right here, Dr. Two-Times.”

  A very disheveled-looking Dr. Collins stumbled out of the shack and squinted in the bright daylight. “I’ll need my glasses, James.”

  “I’ll get them from the pocket of your vest,” James replied. “We’ll also need knives and flashlights.”

  James walked down a short distance to their Rock of Gibraltar, a small sandy dune leading down to the water. As he approached their gear, he saw hundreds of crabs crawling over their BC vests.

  “Get out, you filthy bastards!” he yelled as he ran the final three paces to his dive gear. He was slapping the crabs in all directions when the professor walked up to him.

  “James, those filthy bastards will keep us nourished,” he pointed out.

  James washed off the scuba equipment and stored it in the shack. The two men drank water from the barrel, astonished at how good it tasted. There were several nice-sized coconuts lying about, so James decided to break one open for the tender meat inside.

  The professor laughed hysterically as he watched James futile attempts to crack the coconut. He found a rusty cleaver in the corner of the shack with a beat-up old frying pan and a small kettle, as well as a box of matches. The scholar knew what the cleaver was for. James repeatedly stabbed the coconut with his dive knife just to have it bounce away from him. When Dr. Collins saw that his colleague’s frustration level had peaked, he stepped in to help.

  “Now watch the expert, young man,” he instructed. “First, you firmly grasp the coconut in the left hand and locate the eye of the beastly thing. Then you can figure out the centerline of this poor inanimate object. Secondly, use the blunt end—I repeat, the blunt end—of the cleaver to firmly tap the centerline of the coconut. Rotate the coconut as you firmly tap it and…voilá!”

  James was visibly impressed as he watched the coconut split evenly in half and fall onto the professor’s lap. The two used their dive knives to dig in and eat the fresh meat before washing it down with the sweet milk.

  The pair ate several coconuts, and James saved the husks and the hulls. He gathered dried dune grass and scorched palm leaves. The he scoured their tiny island for flotsam. James knew they would need fire to cook, so these components were necessary.

  Dr. Collins had found a tattered crab trap and used some of the extra fishing wire to effect adequate reconstruction. The two men soon collected a pile of driftwood and dried grass for making fires. Before dusk, they had a full trap of tasty crabs frying over a hot fire as they watched their fishing lines bob in the flaccid ocean.

  “What a difference a day makes,” laughed the professor.

  “This is a superb fishing system you’ve set up,” James chimed in.

 
The professor used six coconut shells as bobbers connected to an old lifesaver ring he’d found. The six bobbers held six hooks that dangled at various depths and were connected to the rope that surrounded the ring, a fishing line connected to the ring and tied around the palm tree for hands-free fishing. If they saw any of the coconut shells doing a jitterbug in the water, they would just untie the line from the palm tree and haul in dinner. Crabs made great bait, and the two scientists didn’t go hungry or thirsty.

  ***

  Rambo was getting frantic. The brothers had been underwater way too long. What was he supposed to do? Should he tell the authorities? No, he couldn’t do that. The hotel directors were the local authority. They decided a course of action, and they only notified the police in Majuro in dire cases. The directors had their own hidden agenda and would not jeopardize the future of their hotel business with nefarious diver deaths. Of course, divers did perish, but the professional dive master wrote the reports, which were sent to the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) headquarters in California. In most cases, the divers were to blame for their own accidents, so no blame was placed on the resorts. In this case, however, the divers had been killed during an unsanctioned dive, and people could be held accountable.

  Rambo knew that Hiroshi could make a great deal of trouble for him, so he untied his skiff from the mooring ball and raced back to the dock. He wouldn’t tell a soul that he had taken the brothers to the USS Saratoga.

  The skiff kicked up a spray of white foam in its haste to return home. Rambo took a final look over his shoulder at the spot where he had seen Bill and Bob plunge to their watery graves.

  ***

  Bill was sucking up air at an exorbitant pace. His struggling only caused him to become more tangled until he could move no more. Suddenly he was able to see much clearer. The sun must have poked through some clouds, and the ambient light was penetrating the depths, illuminating his mausoleum. He could see straight ahead since the tentacles that held him were from the rear. He understood that this was the end, and he felt at ease as a wave of tranquility washed over him. Drowning isn’t too bad, he thought. It’s painless and it will be over in a few minutes.

  His peacefulness was broken by a slight movement ahead. Bill strained his eyes to see what was stealthily approaching. The sunlight that reached this depth refracted and splintered, causing visual distortions. The advancing being was shrouded in a ghostly silver hue. The surreptitious movement of this shimmering shroud had a hypnotic force on Bill until it got right up into his face.

  He screamed with such velocity that his regulator once again flew out of his mouth and he inhaled a mouthful of water. He could not yell again, only choke as a steady stream of bubbles rose from his free flowing second stage. Bill was barely able to reach his octopus and gobble a mouthful of compressed air and regain his composure. The creature went eyeball to eyeball with him, and Bill knew he was looking at a disciple of Lucifer. It hovered in front of him, the huge, angular teeth gleaming. Worse was the coldness of the colossal black eyes that studied him. Without apparent movement, the devilish beast backed up a few feet and studied its prisoner with those unblinking orbs of doom.

  A slow wave of panic gripped Bill in a death hold. He was trapped like a fly in a spider’s web as he watched his captor casually eat his brother Bob. Making a decision, he spit out his air supply and hungrily drank the salt water of death. This would be a quicker, less painful fate than hanging around waiting for the fiend to tear him apart. The last thing he saw was the demon looking over at him with Bob’s leg dangling out of its mouth. That abominable image floated with Bill into his serene afterlife.

  ***

  “What do you mean we have two brothers missing?” Andrej yelled.

  Tanya was quite composed as she explained, “We think the two brothers from Australia went on an unauthorized dive and drowned. The fishing village isn’t talking, but we suspect the brothers hired a local fisherman to take them to a wreck so they could steal artifacts. The fisherman probably panicked when the divers never surfaced, and feared reprisals, so he never reported it. The brothers are scheduled to leave today. Their rooms were not slept in last night and their bags are not packed.”

  Andrej rubbed his hand over his head. “What the hell are we going to do, Tanya? If Hiroshi finds out, he’ll crucify me.”

  “It’s not all bad, Andrej. The missing brothers were leaving here to check in at the Bikini resort to join their friends for another week of diving. I can get their bags packed and delivered to the Bikini resort with express check-in. From there, we can buy some time and then blame the disappearance on their hotel. I can do some public relations work to make the Bikini look bad and the Majestic look great. Oh, and I also want a raise.”

  That bitch, Andrej thought. Thank God I have her and her devious ways. “All right, make it happen—and don’t let Hiroshi find out,” he said. “If you can, use that insidious mind, of yours, to get rid of Hiroshi and make me hotel director. Then I’ll double your pay.”

  “Fairy tales can come true, boss man,” she joked.

  As Tanya left the suite Alex commented, “Boss, she wants your job.”

  “The organization will never give this job to a woman, especially since we have to share duties with the Japs,” Andrej answered. “Those gooks consider Japanese women second-class citizens, and other women are considered slaves.”

  “Just don’t take her lightly, Boss. I wouldn’t be surprised if she played one team against the other.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening here, Alex,” Andrej complained. “Scientists find the Bible, and then the scientists have to disappear. Now I have a cop coming to the hotel, I have two kangaroos missing, and I have to plan a plausible cover up. On top of that, I have to hide these facts from Hiroshi and the home office while attempting to blame the Aussie deaths on the Bikini resort. And that ho demands a raise,” he lamented as he placed his hands over his face.

  Alex answered the ringing phone and had a conversation as Andrej made himself a drink.

  “That was our contact in New York,” Alex said, getting off the phone. “The cop is coming here to recuperate from a gunshot wound. The choice to come here was completely arbitrary. His travel agent used her own accrued points to get him a great deal at the Majestic for the grand opening. His coming here is just a coincidence.”

  “I’m still going to have Tanya keep an eye on him,” Andrej grunted.

  7

  Micko watched the rickety boat approach the dock. It was an ancient tender that had seen better days. The two-tone brown on tan paint job was nauseating, as were the diesel fumes that emanated from the inboard engine. As the boat tied up to the dock, passengers appeared from nowhere. A moment earlier, it had only been Tanya, Chuu, and himself at the dock.

  “I carry your baggage on last, Mr. Mick. Nobody step on it then,” Chuu declared.

  “I’ll take the dive gear, Chuu.”

  “No, no, Mr. Mick. I carry it. You go onboard.”

  Micko stepped onto the boat and quickly went upwind of the fumes. He sat down and watched the other passengers. Most were Japanese laborers, who probably worked at the Majestic. The others were locals who probably scraped out a living as farmers or fishermen if they didn’t work at the resort.

  Tanya went straight to the wheelhouse. As promised, Chuu was the last to get on board with the luggage. Micko traveled light—one suitcase and one dive bag. He carried his camera and small articles in the knapsack.

  “Ha, you look like real tourist, Mr. Mick.”

  “Why? Because I video a lot?” Micko said with a laugh.

  The tender was half full as it blew its whistle and departed on a calm sea. Micko was looking at the water after they entered the atoll and must have unintentionally made a displeased face.

  “We had a bad storm and the runoff turns the water dirty near land,” Chuu explained with a smile. “There a lot of bushes and limbs in the water.”

  “It must have been
quite a storm,” Micko returned.

  “It was.”

  Chuu, with his dancing eyebrows, was as warm as Tanya was cold. He was a world of information during the ride. Micko learned more of the great rivalry between the Bikini resort and the Majuro Majestic Hotel resort. The Bikini resort was operated mostly by locals, but was sparse in its amenities other than scuba diving. Chuu laughed that the dining was mess hall style, with food cooked the Army way. The Majestic, by contrast, had classy restaurants with food served by tuxedo-clad waiters and cooked by world-class chefs in an opulent atmosphere. He went on about the scuba diving being better because the Majestic had two bigger and faster boats. Chuu personally liked the bars, disco, and casino, so he raved about them.

  Micko noticed that the boat was heading north but sticking close to the east shore. This was perplexing because they seemed to be heading toward Bikini Island. Tanya had said they were going straight to Shark Alley Island, which was off to the west.

  He didn’t want to interrupt Chuu because when Tanya was near, Chuu was quiet. Chuu continued explaining that his job was to serve as resort gardener, handyman and van driver when tourists arrived. The van stayed at the airport and was used just to transport tourists and luggage to the dock.

  “How is your boss?” Micko inquired.

  “Mr. Hiroshi very good boss. He good to me.”

  “Is the hotel staff all Japanese?”

  “Mostly, Mr. Mick. Some Bikinians, a few expats, and some Russians also work there.”

  “Russians!” Micko blurted. “How does that work out?”

  Chuu was slow to answer, and Micko could see that he was uneasy with the question. “Never mind, Chuu, it’s just the curiosity in me, always asking questions.”