Barracuda Read online

  The bridge was not as crushed as the lower levels, and there were several large openings where the ambient light allowed great visibility. Several sheets of worn fish netting covered the upper antennae in a veiled shroud. Steve pointed out the danger before slowly leading the way on a tour of the accessible areas of the once imposing war room of the carrier. All the machinery and controls were covered in a bed of soft coral that lit up in an infinite array of colors when splashed with sunlight. It was a perfect day for diving as the sun reached down to the depths from a cloudless sky.

  After the short tour of the bridge, Steve used hand signals to each diver to indicate how much air they had remaining. Each finger represented one hundred psi from a three thousand psi tank. All ten divers were quite experienced, and none were low on air as they began their decompression stops. While doing their various deco stops off gassing, the divers were treated to a sensational show of nature as a large group of gray reef sharks aggressively fed on a school of mackerel far below. The carnage was quick and deadly. When the sharks swam out of view, a school of horse-eyed jacks cleaned up the remains.

  The gray reef sharks were the top predators in these waters, and it was their job to help maintain the delicate balance of nature. If there were too many mackerels, they ate more than their share of the smaller fish and threw off the balance of other fish that fed on the same baitfish. Scientists have discovered just how important this balance was as it slid down the food chain from top predator to the smallest of fish. A drastic change in one species in this sequence adversely affected the entire food chain.

  When the decompression time was over, Steve climbed on board the Lily I first and helped the other divers as they climbed aboard. A rolling boat could be pretty dangerous when divers were fatigued and tried walking with a hundred pounds of gear strapped to their backs. Steve walked each diver safely back to their seats and unbuckled their gear, while Carol stayed in the water until the last diver was seated. It looked like the dive had been a success as the enthusiastic tourists cackled about the sights they had just witnessed.

  Steve was quite happy with himself that this checkout dive had gone so smoothly. He did, however, stop Bill and Bob and ask, “What were you trying to do down there?”

  “What do you mean?” Bill growled.

  “You know exactly what I mean. I saw you two trying to pull that hatch cover off. Didn’t you see the cobweb of hanging wires and cables? I don’t care if you guys want to be foolish and kill yourselves, but the whole dive operation in Bikini will suffer if something like that happens. In addition, with that hatch cover missing, who knows how many other divers will venture in out of curiosity and never swim out?”

  “We’re all big boys here, Steve-o, and if we want to do extreme diving then we will. We paid a lot of money so that we could,” Bill returned with a sneer.

  Steve didn’t budge. “That might fly at other resorts, but while I’m the dive master here, you will obey my dive profile or you can ride over to the Bikini dive resort and dive with them.”

  “Will they let us penetrate the carrier?” Bob asked bluntly.

  “No, they will not,” Steve countered as he walked away toward the scuba tank filling station.

  “That guy is a jerk,” Bill said to his brother.

  “C’mon, Billy, I just think he’s being careful. Remember, nobody has dived here in over half a century, and he’s probably a bit nervous about some wahoos doing something stupid. Besides, we’ll be diving with the Renegades from the Bikini Resort Dive Center in a couple of days.”

  Bill shrugged. “Let’s get some grub, Bob. I’m hungry.”

  But later, back in their room, Bill brought up the subject again. “Did you see how loose that hatch was?” he asked his brother.

  “Yeah, what about it?” Bob returned.

  “I think we can pry it off with a large crowbar. Then we can be the first to gain access.” Bill was excited as he paced around their hotel room. He sat down at the writing desk and made some scribbles on hotel paper.

  Bob looked at his brother like he was nuts. “We can’t just gut the ship and explore it without anyone knowing.”

  “Sure we can. Look, this has been the plan all along! Since that Canadian diver won’t help us, we can hire any one of a number of small fishing boats to take us there while the dive resorts are scheduled to dive on other wrecks. That Canadian can’t tell us what we can or cannot do. We can pay the fishermen to keep quiet, and then we’ll be the first to recover artifacts.”

  “I don’t know. They might have salvage laws that we’d be breaking,” Bob cautioned.

  “Shit, Bob! You are such a pussy! I had to put our business together and run it while you did nothing but worry and second guess me.”

  Bob knew that his brother was right. Bill was the contentious one of the two. When their parents were killed in a car accident in Sydney, the brothers used the insurance money to open the Brothers Grimm Saloon in the Rocks section of Sydney overlooking the harbor. Ironically, it was a drunk driver that had taken their parents lives. Bob didn’t want to call the bar Grimm, but Bill aggressively persisted and won; and the dark humor surrounding the circumstances of the Grimm name made the bar an instant hit.

  The saloon was a popular watering hole for dockworkers and tourists alike. A local scuba club, the Renegades, held their monthly meetings there. This club was more like a biker gang, a squalid sort who had ventured into the world of extreme diving. They would attack a virgin shipwreck like a school of piranha and remove all the artifacts before other divers could view them. This was very disturbing to other dive clubs because there was a great dissension amongst divers in regard to stripping a shipwreck solely for personal souvenirs. The Renegades were considered to be a rebellious coterie, and they gave a bad name to serious wreck divers who took joy in just taking pictures and experiencing the thrill of exploration.

  Bob remembered that Bill had bullied him into taking this dive trip to Shark Alley Island a week prior to the Renegades’ arrival. Bill wanted to reconnoiter Bikini Atoll first and then come back with the Renegades later. The Renegades already had a scavenger hunt planned inside the Saratoga. The divers who retrieved the most hidden objects won a variety of prizes from a cash pool that Bill had already collected. Bill was to hide the objects while Bob made a list of what was hidden where. The objects were Renegade bandanas tied in various locations within the coffin-like confines of the ship. Bill was miffed because he had fifty bandanas and couldn’t gain access to the ship’s interior. He also had fifty-five hundred dollars worth of prizes back at the saloon for the scavenger hunt winners.

  “Bob, I have to gain access through that bent hatch and hide the bandanas, otherwise the Renegades will go nuts. I’ll begin searching for a big enough crowbar tonight, and a local fisherman to take us to the Saratoga after the Majestic dive boat leaves the site. They have a nine o’clock dive scheduled, so they should be off the wreck and back at the dock by eleven. We’ll go out there at noon on Tuesday, pry open the hatchway, and hide the bandanas. We’ll leave the Majestic on Wednesday and meet up with the Renegades at the Bikini dive resort. While they do their scavenger hunt, we can rape the wreck of its artifacts.”

  Bob didn’t like the idea at all, but he knew it was pointless to fight his older brother. He just wanted to enjoy the rest of the dives before the dreaded assault on the Saratoga’s hatch cover.

  ***

  After an entire week, Dr. Collins and James were exhausted after diving and making notes during fifteen-hour days. They were sitting by the pool enjoying a cocktail and discussing their research, both having agreed to take a day off from diving lest they suffer from complete exhaustion.

  Dr. Collins had been having the time of his life. Each morning, the intrepid scientists had gathered their gear and carried it down to the dock. They’d made arrangements with an older fisherman and rented one of his sixteen-foot skiffs powered by a Mercury engine. They both loved the early morning air blowing on their salt-crusted fac
es as they powered out into the crystal blue lagoon. Relying on information supplied by Dr. Silver and the local fisherman, the nutty professor located the gray reef sharks’ route into and out of the Bikini Atoll. He discovered that the gray reef sharks in the area were apparently migratory and did not always stay in the lagoon. It seemed that they only came in to feed, in contrast to the subjects he studied in other oceans, which inhabited a specific reef and became fiercely territorial of that particular reef. Dr. Collins thought that years of radioactivity exposure might have led to a new and undiscovered breed of gray reef shark. James argued that environmental factors could have forced the sharks to behave differently there than in other locations around the world.

  “James, these sharks do not stay and protect their reef and food source like all other gray reefers,” Dr. Collins explained with exaggerated patience.

  “That’s true, Doctor, but that doesn’t mean this is a new breed. Heck, there are so many reefs and wrecks here. Why would they just act territorial about one? These sharks are the top predators, so they can just come and go like this atoll is their own personal restaurant.”

  The two did agree that they had found the sharks’ passageway into the atoll. At the southernmost end of Bikini Atoll was a small set of islands called the Aereokoj-Eneman chain. To the east of this chain was the wide ten-kilometer entrance to the lagoon and the island of Eneu with the airport. This was the route used by the supply ships. It was a fairly active waterway, and the large pelagic avoided it. However, just to the west of the Aereokoj-Eneman chain stood the small islands of Enidrik and Lukoj. A narrow underwater volcanic mountain range was located between the two landmasses, which served as the gateway to the atoll for the gray reef sharks.

  On the first dive at this location, James lowered the anchor and fastened it firmly to the rocky bottom. They geared up, Dr. Collins with help from James, and then performed perfunctory safety checks on each other. When they were satisfied that all the buckles were connected and the equipment was secured, they did a backward roll over the skiff’s low gunwale and gently slipped into the water.

  The professor led the way through the clear water as he followed the anchor line to the depths. He noticed that they were in the middle of a rocky ridge with volcanic walls resembling the insides of a subway tunnel. James’descent was slower and more methodical that the professor’s.

  When they were reunited at the base of the underwater canyon, they checked their dive instruments. James noticed that he had almost three thousand psi of air and that they were in one hundred and twenty feet of salt water (fsw). The water temperature was seventy-eight degrees. The cooler ocean water entered the atoll at that point before heating up to more than eighty degrees. James looked over at the professor, who was still studying his instruments when suddenly he was startled by a chain of gray reef sharks approaching from the open ocean.

  The sharks passed the scientists in succession as they entered the atoll. Dr. Collins fumbled with his underwater camera attached to his vest D-ring with a brass clip. In his haste to film the progression of gray reefers, he clumsily failed to free the camera. James reached over and ended the poor professor’s misery with a simple release of the brass clip, and the doctor snapped picture after picture as the endless train of sharks glided past.

  James backed off from the sharks, knowing that his exhaust bubbles could disturb their unwavering flight. The professor noticed this and slid ever closer to the silent freight train of sharks, who paid no attention to the scientists as they swam with purpose through this underwater cavern into the lagoon.

  This discovery caused huge excitement for the two scientists. Each day, the pair dove into the underwater mountain range and observed the sharks’ behavior. They noted that the sharks appeared to be more defiant than the common gray reef sharks and were also much larger. Dr. Collins was able to video these sharks and noted that they just ignored him. In other oceans, the gray reefers were more skittish when he approached. James made notes on his underwater slate and made the same observations.

  The two were especially excited about attempting a new experiment. The professor had developed his own underwater satellite video tracking system and was anxious to utilize it. The system was constructed with a high-tech high-resolution video camera placed in a small waterproof ball attached to the wall of the underwater mountain range by a stainless steel cable and resembled a mooring ball. The camera was equipped with a wide-angle lens, and the ball would float back and forth in response to tidal action. The sun would provide power to the camera through a solar panel attached by another mooring ball, and the transmitter would send video images to a satellite that would then download the video for later retrieval. When the sun would set, the rechargeable battery would kick in for a few hours. The camera was set up so that when the battery was the primary source of power, the night vision lens automatically came on.

  Dr. Collins and James were hoping they could videotape the sharks coming through the passageway over the period of up to sixteen hours. Leaving a camera moored at the entrance to the atoll gave the scientists more time to conduct other experiments and make other observations in the lagoon itself. Here they noted that these gray reef sharks hunted in packs, and that rather than attack individual fish, they brazenly attacked entire schools. These sharks didn’t always return to the same reef but moved from shipwreck to shipwreck, probably in an attempt to confuse their prey.

  Bikini sharks attacking entire schools of fish was certainly a new idiosyncrasy of this species. This fact the two scientists agreed upon. They were still at odds as to whether or not this was a new breed of shark, but they both knew that the only way to resolve this matter was to capture a specimen and dissect it. They also needed to tag a live shark with a homing device that could transmit where these sharks went after they fed and exited the atoll.

  “Doctor, we could probably find a specimen at the fisherman’s dock for our necropsy, and we could also hire a fisherman to help us tag a live one,” James offered.

  “That would work. That would work,” answered Dr. Two-Times. He knew that the task was too immense for them with the small skiff they had rented for their daily dives. “We’ll meet the fishing fleet when they return later and see if anyone has a gray reefer to sell,” he said.

  ***

  Several men and women were sitting in the pool enjoying various libations, but the scientists preferred the privacy of a shaded poolside table. The barmaid who had brought them their drinks had introduced herself as Flacka. She was rather thin, a short-haired woman with a bright smile, the kind of person people instantly liked.

  After they finished their first round, James asked, “Dare we have another, Professor?” He flashed a playful grin at this collaborator.

  “Yes, we may, and I want to speak with that gentlewoman,” Dr. Collins responded.

  James motioned to Flacka that the duo required another round. She dutifully complied and brought them fresh drinks. As she was collecting the empty glasses, the professor queried, “Do you know of any fishermen that capture gray reef sharks?”

  Flacka looked at the professor incredulously. “No fisherman catches those sharks. Sometimes they catch a smaller white-tip shark or a Thresher shark, but never a gray reefer.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “The locals consider the gray reefer to be sacred, and we thank them for our bounty. The reefer keeps other large fish from entering our lagoon and eating our precious meals,” Flacka answered.

  James and Dr. Collins exchanged looks. “We’re scientists,” James explained. “We would like to catch a reefer, place an electronic monitor tag on it, and release it unharmed,” James explained.

  “Go see Celestial. He is the master of the Hummingbird. Tell him I sent you. He knows about these things, but he is leery of outsiders.” Flacka flashed a one hundred-watt smile at the men and returned to her duties.

  With a little help from the alcohol, the happy scientists heaped praise upon each other and the gre
at progress they had made in such a short time. When they finished their cocktails, Dr. Collins generously handed Flacka a twenty-dollar bill, thanking her for her assistance. The two then headed for the dock.

  It was a postcard sunset with the sails and masts of returning boats silhouetted against a crimson sky. The dock was newly built, but it was already showing signs of age and use. The wooden pilings were stained and crusted with barnacles, and old truck tires were being used as bumpers, hanging drunkenly along the length of the dock.

  Many of the locals gathered at the water’s edge each night to greet the homecoming fishermen. As the boats tied up to their places along the dock, cheers erupted from the crowd. James thought this was part local legend, giving thanks for the safe return of their loved ones, and part joy to have fresh food on the table. Representatives from local eateries were also present to purchase fresh fish. The Majestic bought their food this way, as did the Bikini resort. In fact, the Majestic also sent a representative to the Bikini resort dock and examined their fish for purchase since they used larger quantities in their much larger hotel.

  The dock filled quickly as the boats arrived and displayed the day’s catch. The smell of fresh fish soon became overwhelming as the catch was laid akimbo on the dock. Dozens of species were exhibited: yellow tail tuna, large amberjacks, horse-eyed jacks, red drum, grouper, a variety of snappers, and sea bass, to name a few. The scientists were truly amazed at the diversity of the day’s catch.

  Dr. Collins wished to be discrete with Celestial and his plans for hiring him and the Hummingbird, so he said to James, “Let’s come back later when this seafood carnival is over.”

  ***

  The scientists were enjoying a nice dinner when one of the Japanese waiters brought Dr. Collins his journal. “Sir, you left this behind after your lunch. I recognized it because you always come to be seated with your ledger in hand.” The man smiled and retreated toward another table of diners.