“Whenever I went over to Willie’s house to play, I would always find some excuse to spend a little time on the porch sitting next to Mr. Adams. Willie would fidget uncomfortably, unable to understand why I wanted to listen to his father tell his old, supposedly boring stories. Mr. Adams had been in the Korean War and he loved to tell about his friends and the battles and, particularly, the Korean women and what he called their tricks.
“Anyway, you could always tell when Mr. Adams was about to start one of his stories. His eyes would begin to stare in front of him, as if he were looking intently at something far off in the distance, and he would say, as much to himself as anybody, ‘Tell the truth, Baby Ruth.’ Then he would recite the story, almost as if he were quoting from a written book, ‘We had driven the North Koreans back to the Yalu and our battalion commander told us they were ready to surrender,’ he would say. “We were feeling good, talking about what we were all going to do when we got back to the States. But then the great yellow horde poured out of China . . .’ ”
Troy stopped. He stared out at the ocean. It was easy for Carol to see him as a young boy, sitting on a porch with his embarrassed friend Willie and listening to stories told by a man who lived hopelessly in the past but who, nevertheless, represented the father that Troy had never had. She leaned over to Troy and touched his forearm. “It makes a pretty picture,” she said. “You probably never knew how happy you made that man by listening to his stories.”
Around on the other side of the canopy, Nick Williams was sitting by himself in another deck chair. He was reading Madame Bovary and trying without success to ignore both his residual hangover and the scattered tidbits of conversation he was overhearing. He had programmed the navigation system to return automatically to the dive site from Thursday, so there was nothing else he really needed to do to pilot the boat. Nick almost certainly would have enjoyed sharing the conversation with Carol and Troy, but after his earlier confrontation with her, in which he felt she had made it clear that she didn’t want to associate with him, he was not about to join them. It was now necessary that he ignore her. Otherwise she would conclude that he was just another wimp.
And besides, he liked his book. He was reading the part where Emma Bovary gives herself over completely to the affair with Rudolph Boulanger. Nick could see Emma sneaking away from her house in the small French provincial village and racing across the fields into the arms of her lover. Most of the time in the past, whenever Nick had read a novel about a beautiful, dark heroine, he had pictured Monique. But interestingly enough, the Emma Bovary that he was envisioning while he was reading on the boat was Carol Dawson. And more than once that morning, when Nick had read Flaubert’s descriptions of the passions of Emma and Rudolph, he had imagined himself in the role of the bachelor from the French landed gentry making love to Emma/Carol.
The automatic navigation system that guided the boat while Nick was reading consisted of a simple transmitter/receiver combination and a small miniprocessor. Taking advantage of a worldwide set of synchronous satellites, software in the processor established the boat’s location very precisely and then followed a preprogrammed steering algorithm to the desired final site. Along the way, the two-way link with the satellite overhead provided the necessary information to up date the path through the ocean.
When the Florida Queen was within a mile of the dive site, the nav system sounded a tone. Nick then went to the controls and changed to manual guidance. Carol and Troy rose from their chairs. “Remember,” she said, “the primary purpose of our dive is to photograph and salvage whatever it was that we saw down in that fissure on Thursday. If we have enough time afterward, we will go back to the overhang where we found the trident.”
Carol walked over and switched on the monitor attached to the ocean telescope. She was standing only a few feet away from Nick. They had not exchanged any words since right after the boat left Key West. “Good luck,” he said quietly.
She looked at him to see whether he was serious or was being sarcastic. She couldn’t tell. “Thank you,” she said evenly.
Troy joined Carol at the monitor. She pulled the photographs out of the envelope so they could be used to define the exact spot to anchor. For a couple of minutes she issued instructions to Nick, based on what she was seeing from the telescope, commanding small corrections to the boat’s position. At last the ocean floor underneath them looked almost exactly as it had on Thursday when they had seen the whales. With one major difference.
“Now where’s that hole in the reef?” Troy said innocently. “I don’t seem to be able to find it on the monitor.”
Carol’s heart was speeding as she glanced back and forth from the telescope screen to the photographs. Where is that fissure? she thought, It can’t have disappeared. The boat drifted away from the dive site and Nick steered it back. This time Troy dropped the anchor overboard. But Carol still could not see any sign of the fissure. She could not understand it.
“Nick,” she said finally, “could you give us a hand? We were down there together and we both saw the hole. Are Troy and I just confused in some way?”
Nick came over from the steering wheel under the canopy and stared into the monitor. He too was puzzled. But he thought he saw other things on the bottom of the ocean that also looked a little different. “I don’t see the hole either,” he said, “but maybe it’s just the lighting. We were here in the afternoon last time and now it’s ten in the morning.”
Troy turned to Carol. “Maybe Nick ought to dive with you. He was there before, has seen the fissure, and knows how to find the overhang. Everything I know is from the pictures.”
“No,” said Carol quickly. “I want to dive with you. Nick’s probably right. We just can’t see the fissure because of the different lighting.” She picked up her underwater camera and walked around the canopy toward the back of the boat. “Let’s get going,” she said. “We’ll do just fine.”
Troy gave Nick a silent shrug, as if to say “I tried,” and followed her a few moments later.
3
“BUT Richard,” Ramirez said, “we could get into big trouble.”
“I don’t see how,” Lieutenant Todd replied. “Or why anybody ever has to know. The Navy built the system, after all, primarily for its own ships. We just allow everyone else to use it. All we have to do is interrogate the master register and get the Doppler and ranging time history for their particular identification code. Then we can figure out where they are. It’s easy. We do it all the time for our own vessels.”
“But we signed a maritime convention restricting our access to the private registers except in life-or-death or national security cases,” Ramirez continued. “I can’t just tap into the satellite files because you and I suspect a certain boat of being on an illegal mission. We need more authority.”
“Look, Roberto,” Todd argued vehemently, “who do you think is going to give us permission? We don’t have the photographs. We only have your word for it. No. We must act on our own. If we’re wrong, then nobody ever has to know about it. If we’re right, we’ll nail that bastard, we’ll both be heroes, and nobody will give us a hard time about what we’ve done.”
Ramirez was silent for a few seconds. “Don’t you at least think we should inform Commander Winters? He is, after all, the officer in charge of this Panther investigation.”
“Absolutely not,” said Lieutenant Todd quickly. “You heard him at the meeting yesterday. He thinks we’re out of line already. He’d like nothing better than to shit all over us. He’s jealous.” Todd saw that Ramirez was still undecided. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “we’ll call him after we find out where the vessel is.”
Lieutenant Ramirez shook his head. “That won’t make any difference. We still will have exceeded our authority.”
“Shit,” said Todd in exasperation. “Tell me what has to be done and I’ll do it. Without you. I’ll take all the risk.” He stopped and looked directly at Ramirez. “I can’t fucking understand it. I guess you Mexicans really are gutless. You’re the one who actually saw the missile in the photograph, but . . .”
Ramirez’s eyes narrowed. His voice became hard. “That’s enough, Todd. We’ll get the data. But if this turns out to be a disaster, I will personally break your neck with my own hands.”