Benchley, Peter - Novel 08 Read online

  “Because …” Sharp hesitated, knowing that most people would have trouble understanding his reasoning. “It’s something I’ve never done before. I want to see what it’s like.”

  “You’ve never been to the moon before, either. Would you go to the moon if somebody asked you?”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, I surely would.”

  “God almighty, Sharp,” Wallingford said, shaking his head. “Okay, you’ve got it. Be at Dockyard at sixteen hundred. They’re gonna go out and anchor tonight, and put the sub down first thing tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sharp. “How official is this? Should I wear a uniform?”

  “No. But take a sweater and some warm socks. I hear it’s cold three thousand feet down there in the dark.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sharp saluted and turned to go.

  “Sharp,” Wallingford said, stopping him at the door.

  “Sir?”

  “I was gonna send you, even if you hadn’t volunteered.” Wallingford grinned. “I just wanted to hear you make your case.”

  Back in his quarters, Sharp packed an overnight bag, and threw in a Walkman, a few tapes and a book. By the time he had taken a shower and put on a pair of jeans and a denim shirt, it was nearly 1500. Dockyard was at the other end of Bermuda, an hour away by motorbike, so he picked up his bag and started out of the room. At the door he remembered that he had been scheduled to go diving the next day with Darling, and so he went back inside and picked up the phone.

  Darling’s wife answered, and before Sharp could leave a message she said Whip was down on the boat and she’d go fetch him. While he waited, Sharp wondered whether he should tell Darling where he was going. Knowing the navy’s passion for secrecy, he assumed that this trip was classified, even though it involved a national magazine that planned to document it on film. But the navy liked to classify everything, from the number of potatoes bought for the mess to the price paid for enlisted men’s socks.

  Screw secrecy, he decided. The odds were good that Darling knew all about it anyway.

  “Glad you called, Marcus,” Darling said when he picked up the phone. “I was gonna call you. How about a rain check for tomorrow’s diving? There’s a bunch of people here from some magazine who want to put a submarine down to take pictures of the squid. They’ve hired me as escort.”

  “You’re going? What do you mean, escort?”

  “They don’t know where to look for the thing. They don’t know where the drop-off is, or where the bottom shelves off, or where the deep begins. They’ve got a fathometer and a side-scan sonar, and if they took the time they could find out for themselves. But that boat must cost ten thousand a day to run, so they see using me as a shortcut.”

  “And you agreed to go? I thought—”

  “Marcus. It’s a thousand dollars a day. But all I’ll do is show ‘em where to go, tell ‘em where to aim their cameras and float around over their submarine in case it has to surface away from the ship.” Darling laughed. “You can be damn sure I’m not going down in that sub.”

  “Whip,” Sharp said, and he paused, feeling his enthusiasm begin to ebb. “I’m supposed to go with them.”

  “You? What for?”

  “The navy’s worried that they’ll snoop around our sonar gear, maybe decide to justify their expenses by doing a story on how much money we’re wasting monitoring Soviet submarines that don’t exist.”

  “What makes Wallingford so sure they won’t find the squid?”

  “The navy thinks it’s gone away,” Sharp said. “So do the people from the Oceanographic Administration and Scripps.”

  “Well, I don’t. Neither does Talley, or he would have gone back to Canada. No, it’s likely that the critter is down there, Marcus. I’m pretty sure he’s down there somewhere.” For a moment there was silence on the line, then Darling said, “You said you were going with them. You don’t mean you’re going down in that submarine.”

  “Sure,” Sharp said. “That’s the whole point.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I have to, Whip.”

  “No you don’t, Marcus.” Darling paused, then said, “There’s one thing we both have to remember: There’s a big difference between being brave and being foolish.”

  23

  THE ROYAL NAVY Dockyard had been built in the nineteenth century by convicts—called “transports,” for they had been transported out from England and housed in prison hulks grounded on the muddy bottom of Grassy Bay. Its stone walls were more than ten feet thick, its cobbled streets had been paved by hand. It occupied the entire northern end of Ireland Island, and had once been a civilization unto itself. There had been barracks for hundreds of soldiers, cook houses, jail cells, sail lofts, chandleries, rope lockers and armories.

  Now, as Sharp walked along the quay toward the little ship tied to the dock, a dock that still occasionally sheltered British and American ships-of-the-line, he passed boutiques, cafes, souvenir shops, a museum.

  Lettering on the transom identified the ship as the Ellis Explorer, from Fort Lauderdale. Measuring his paces, Sharp walked along the dock beside the ship. She was 150 feet long, more or less, and most of her was open stern. About halfway between the fantail and the cabin, the submersible rested on its cradle, covered by a tarpaulin. Clearly, the ship was brand-new, built, he guessed after appraising its sleek lines, in Holland or Germany, and it was meticulously tended. There wasn’t a speck of rust on the hull, not a chip or a scuff mark on the paint. Ropes on the deck were perfectly coiled, and the steel-and-aluminum superstructure gleamed in the afternoon sun. Whoever owns this vessel, he thought, isn’t worried about money.

  A woman stood in the bow, tossing pieces of bread to a school of little fish.

  “Hello,” Sharp said.

  She turned to him and said, “Hi.” She was in her late twenties, tall and lithe and deeply tanned. She wore cutoff jeans, a man’s Oxford shirt with its tails tied at her waist and a Rolex diver’s watch. Her sun-bleached brown hair was cut short and swept back from her face. A pair of sunglasses hung from a cord around her neck.

  “I’m Marcus Sharp… . Lieutenant Sharp.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Right. Come on aboard.”

  Sharp walked up the gangway and stepped onto the deck.

  “I’m Stephanie Carr,” the woman said, smiling and holding out her hand. “I take pictures.” She led him aft, into the cabin.

  The cabin was large and comfortably furnished. There were two folding tables on gimbals, two vinyl-covered sofas bolted to the deck, a stack of plastic chairs, racks of paperback books and, on a shelf, a television set and VCR. Steps led up to the bridge forward and down to the galley and the staterooms aft.

  A short, wiry man with a crew cut, who might have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five, sat on the deck and watched a tape of a James Bond movie.

  “That’s Eddie,” Stephanie said. “He drives the sub. Eddie, this is Marcus.”

  Eddie gestured distractedly and said, “Hey.”

  Sharp noticed that one of the tables was littered with cameras, strobes, light meters and boxes of film. “Do you have a writer with you?” he asked Stephanie.

  “No,” she said. “I do it all. Besides, if we get pictures of this monster, no one’s going to care about words.” She pointed to the staircase aft. “There are a couple of empty cabins below. You can put your stuff wherever you want.”

  Sharp tossed his bag onto a chair. “Who’s Ellis?” he said. “The name—Ellis Explorer.”

  “Barnaby Ellis … Ellis Bearings … the Ellis Foundation … Ellis Publications. The bearings funded the foundation, the foundation owns the boat. When one of the publications needs the boat, they borrow it from the foundation.”

  “You work for him?”

  “No, I’m free lance. I work for the Geographic, for Traveler, for whoever wants to pay me.”

  “Hey, navy man,” a voice called down from the bridge.

  “Come meet Hector,” Stephanie said, and she led th
e way up onto the bridge.

  Hector appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was dark-skinned and beefy, and he wore a starched white shirt with captain’s shoulder boards, creased black trousers and spit-shined black shoes. He was working with a pencil and a ruler on a chart of the waters around Bermuda. “This Darling,” he said, “he tells me to go anchor out here”—he tapped a spot on the chart—“but out here there’s no bottom.”

  “Did he talk you through it?” Sharp asked.

  “Every step. Around the point here, north from here to the buoy, then northwest to here. But the chart says there’s no bottom till five hundred fathoms. I can’t anchor in five hundred fathoms.”

  “Do what he says,” said Sharp. “If he says there’s a bottom there, there’s a bottom there. It may be a sea mount, it may be a ledge. It may be part of the shelf.”

  “But the chart—”

  “Captain,” Sharp said, “in Bermuda, if I had to choose between some mapmaker from Coast and Geodetic Survey and Whip Darling, I’d go with Whip Darling every time.”

  It was after five when they left the point at Dockyard behind and headed north toward the channel markers. Sharp and Stephanie stood on the observation deck atop the cabin and watched the little puffs of cumulus cloud change color as the lowering sun struck them from different angles.

  “Where do you live?” Sharp asked.

  “San Francisco, sort of. But nowhere, really. I keep a tiny apartment there, just to have a place to come back to, but I’m away ten or eleven months a year.”

  “So you’re not married.”

  “Hardly,” she said, smiling. “Who’d have me? He’d never see me. When I got started in this business—fresh out of college, I was working for a little paper in Kansas, and I moonlighted wildlife pictures—I knew I’d have to make a choice. I knew I couldn’t have it both ways. A lot of my friends are photographers who specialize in what I do—sports, adventure, animals—and of the ones who get married, ninety percent get divorced.”

  “Is it worth it?”

  “It has been. I’ve been everywhere in the world, my passport’s as thick as the phone book. I’ve met a lot of people, done a lot of crazy things, photographed everything from tigers to army ants. But I’m beginning to get tired of it. Now and then, I think about settling down. But every time I do, the phone rings, and I’m off to somewhere new.” She waved her hand at the sea, and said, “Like now.”

  “How much do you know about giant squid?”

  “Nothing. Well, almost nothing. I read a couple of articles on the way over. I gather that nobody’s ever gotten a picture of one, and that’s enough for me; it isn’t often one of us gets to do something that’s never been done before.”

  “There’s a reason, you know. They’re rare, and they’re dangerous.”

  “Well,” she said, “that’s the fun of it, right? Look at it this way, Marcus. We’re getting paid to do what other people couldn’t do if they had all the money in the world: take chances and make discoveries. It’s called living.”

  As Sharp looked at her, he suddenly felt a stab of pain that he hadn’t felt in many months, the pain of remembering Karen.

  “I tell you,” Hector said, pointing at the fathometer, “there’s no bottom here.” A faint orange light whirled on a circular screen, blipping brighter as it passed the mark for 480 fathoms.

  “Are you sure you’re in the right place?” Sharp asked.

  “The SatNav says I’m on the money, right where he said.”

  Sharp looked out the window. There was nothing in the color of the water that suggested a shallow spot; the sea was a uniform gray, like burnished steel. “Drop the anchor,” he said.

  “Easy for you to say, navy man,” said Hector. “It’s not your two grand worth of anchor and chain.”

  “Drop it. If you lose it, I’ll dive it up for you myself.” Sharp smiled.

  Hector looked at him, then said, “Shit,” and pushed the button that released the anchor. They heard a splash, followed by the rattle of chain through the hawsehole in the bow. A crewman in a striped matelot shirt stood on the forepeak and watched the chain plummet.

  “Mind if I turn on your side-scan?” Sharp asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  Sharp turned the switch on the side-scan sonar and pressed his face to the rubber gasket. The gray screen brightened, and a white line appeared, created by reflected sonar impulses, showing the contour of the bottom more than half a mile away. Where is it? he wondered. Where’s the secret shelf that’ll snag the anchor before it disappears into the deep?

  He heard Hector say, “I’ll be damned,” and just then a tiny white stroke appeared on the top left corner of the sonar screen, reflecting a little outcropping from the cliff. The rattle of the anchor chain stopped.

  “Two hundred and ten feet,” Hector said. “How the hell did Darling know that?”

  “Twenty-five years at sea out here, that’s how,” Sharp said. “Whip knows every pimple on the ledge; and he knew how the tide would carry your anchor.”

  “Does he know where this giant squid is?”

  “Nobody knows that,” Sharp said, and he went down the steps into the cabin.

  *

  They had dinner in the cabin: microwaved hamburgers, steamed pasta and salad. When they had washed the dishes, Eddie and the two crewmen gathered around the TV and watched a tape of The Hunt for Red October, and Hector returned to the bridge.

  Stephanie poured coffee for herself and Sharp, took a cigarette from one of her camera bags and led him outside onto the open stern. The moon was so bright that it extinguished the stars around it; the sea was as flat as glass.

  “What about you?” she asked him. “Are you married?”

  “No,” Sharp said, and then—he wasn’t sure why—he told her about Karen.

  “That’s rough,” she said when he had finished. “I don’t think I could deal with that kind of pain.”

  Before Sharp could say anything else, they heard Hector shout, “Hey, navy man!” from the bridge.

  They walked forward along a passageway on the port side and up four steel steps to the outside door of the bridge.

  “Come here,” Hector said.

  Sharp stepped inside the bridge. In darkness, it looked like an abandoned nightclub, for the only lights were the red and green and orange glows from the electronic gear.

  “What do you make of that?” Hector said, and he gestured at the side-scan sonar.

  “Of what?”

  “We’ve been swinging at anchor. I think maybe we swung ourselves right overtop a shipwreck.”

  As he bent to the machine, Sharp thought what a nice irony it would be if they did discover an old wreck, unseen and untouched for hundreds of years. They had the submersible, so they could reach the wreck, photograph it, perhaps even recover something from it. Whip would be amazed.

  Sharp closed his eyes, then opened them again and let them focus on the gray screen. He knew that side-scan sonar images could be remarkably accurate, if the object being drawn was in good shape, alone and on a flat bottom. He had seen a side-scan picture in National Geographic of a ship that had sunk in the Arctic. The ship sat upright on the bottom, its masts and superstructure clearly visible, looking as if it were about to sail away. But that ship had sunk at anchor in three hundred feet of water. If there was a ship here, it had tumbled for half a mile, probably breaking apart as it fell. It might be nothing more than a heap of scrap.

  What he saw was a shapeless smear. He looked at the calibration numbers on the side of the screen: The smear seemed to be twenty or thirty meters long, possibly the right size for a shipwreck.

  “It could be,” he said.

  “Have a look at it from the sub tomorrow,” said Hector. “A lot of ships were lost around here during the war. Maybe it’s one of them. Give me the loran numbers, will you?”

  Sharp stepped away from the sonar screen and crossed the bridge to the loran. He read the numbers aloud to Hector, who scribbled the
m on a piece of paper.

  None of them looked at the sonar screen again. If they had, they would have seen a change in the shapeless smear. They would have seen some lines fade, others appear, as the thing three thousand feet beneath them began to move.

  24

  KAREN’S ARMS WERE out, reaching for him; her eyes pleaded for help, and she was screaming, but in a language he couldn’t understand. He tried to reach her, but his legs wouldn’t work. He felt as if he were slogging through transparent mud or being held back by something that forced him to move in slow motion. The closer he got, the farther away she seemed. And then something was chasing her, something he couldn’t see but that must be huge and terrifying, for her fear became panic and her screams grew louder. All of a sudden she disappeared, and the thing chasing her was gone, too, and all that was left was a loud, piercing buzz.

  Sharp awoke, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. The bed was small, not his, and the light was dim. Only the buzz remained, an urgent summons from somewhere near his head. He rolled over and saw an intercom phone on the bulkhead. He picked up the phone and mumbled his name.

  “Rise and shine, Marcus,” said Stephanie. “Time to

  go.”

  As he hung up, Sharp felt a rush of adrenaline. He had volunteered for this, but what yesterday had seemed exciting was fast becoming frightening. He had never ridden in a submarine, let alone a submarine a third the size of a subway car. He didn’t like crowded elevators— who did?—and he felt uneasy in interior cabins on ships.

  He suddenly wondered if he would discover he was a closet claustrophobe.

  Well, he thought, you’ll soon find out.

  As he shaved and dressed in jeans, a shirt, wool socks and a sweater, his apprehension gave way once again to excitement. At least this was action, a challenge. At least this was something new. As Stephanie would say, this was living.