• • •
There was a flurry of activity on deck. They had seen the oncoming race boat. The yacht’s anchor was coming out of the water, but the boat would have to sprout wings to avoid a disastrous collision.
“It’s going to hit!” Zavala said, more in wonder than in apprehension.
Austin’s hand seemed to move by itself, the fingertips pushing down on the throttles. Engines roaring, the Red Ink lurched forward as if it were a racehorse stung by a bee. The acceleration caught Zavala by surprise, but he tightened his grip on the steering wheel and pointed the Red Ink at the runaway boat. Their ability to intuit what the other was thinking had saved their skin more than once while carrying out a NUMA assignment. Austin slammed the throttles forward. The catamaran came up on plane and streaked across the open water. They were going twice the speed of the Carpet, coming in at an angle. Interception was only seconds away.
“Keep us parallel and come up alongside,” Austin said. “When I yell, nudge him to starboard.”
Austin’s brain synapses danced with enough electrical energy to light up a city. The Red Ink went up the side of a wave, flew through the air, and came down with a jaw-jarring splash. The yacht was moving slowly forward. This would give them a slight increase in the margin of error, but not much.
The two boats were almost side by side. Zavala displayed his incredible skill as a pilot, bringing the Red Ink closer despite the waves from the broadening wake. Austin let them overtake the Carpet, move past it, then slowly pulled back on the throttles to match the speed of the other boat. They were only yards apart.
Austin had slipped into the nether land between intellect and action, pure reflex, his every sense at full alert. The ear-splitting thunder of four powerful engines drowned out attempts at rational thought. He had become one with the Red Ink, his muscles and sinews joined with the steel and Kevlar, as much a part of the boat as the pistons and driveshaft. The boats were out of sync, one up when the other was down. Austin fine-tuned the Red Ink’s speed until they were like two dolphins swimming abreast in perfect formation.
Up.
Down.
Up.
“Now!” he yelled.
The space between the racing boats narrowed to inches. Zavala eased the steering wheel to the right. It was a delicate maneuver. If it were done too sharply, they would hook hulls and possibly flip into the air in a lethal tangle. There was a loud hollow thump and a screech of tortured carbon composite as the hulls came together, then bounced apart. Zavala brought the boat over again and held it firmly in position. The wheel wanted to tear itself out of his hands.
Austin gunned the throttles. The sound of the engines was horrendous. Again the boats crashed. It was like trying to herd a very large and powerful steer. Eventually the Flying Carpet began to yield its forward momentum and angle off to the right. They drifted apart once more. Warmed to the game, Zavala slammed the boats together. The angle increased.
“Haul off, Joe!”
Ali’s boat surged ahead on a track that would miss the yacht’s stern and sped toward the flotilla. Boats scattered like dry leaves in a wind. Austin knew that battering Ali’s boat off-course would send the Red Ink off like a cue ball in a game of billiards. He hadn’t counted on how long it would take to persuade the Carpet to take a hike. Now he and Joe were hurtling toward the moving yacht with only seconds to spare before they struck it. They could see the horrified expressions of the people on deck. The boat was going seventy-five miles an hour. Even if he shut down the engines, he and Zavala would have to be scraped off the wooden sides of the old boat.
“What now?” Zavala yelled.
“Stay on course,” Austin shouted.
Zavala swore softly under his breath. He had every confidence in Austin’s ability to get them out of a tight spot, but sometimes his partner’s actions defied all logic. If Zavala thought the order meant certain suicide, he didn’t show it. His every instinct told him to whip the wheel over and take his chances, but he grimly held their insane course as steadily as if the two-hundred-foot boat that filled his vision like a big white wall were nothing but a mirage. He gritted his teeth and tensed his body in preparation for the impact.
“Duck,” Austin ordered. “Keep your head low. I’m going to stuff it.”
He bent and gunned the engines at full throttle; at the same time he set the trim tabs and ailerons. A stuff was usually something to be avoided. It happens when a boat comes off one wave and burrows into another. The worst type is called a submarine, because that’s what the boat becomes when it goes into a stuff at high speed. Far from avoiding this result, Austin was counting on it happening. He held his breath as the race boat nosed down at a sharp angle, buried its bows in the water, and kept on going, burrowing into the sea like a badger. With the full power of the engines behind it, the Red Ink was transformed from a surface boat into a submersible.
The boat passed under the moving yacht, but not quite deep enough to prevent its canopies from being ripped off. There was a sickening watery crunch. The whirling propellers missed their heads by inches. Then the catamaran passed under the yacht and emerged on the other side. Exploding from the water like a very large and very red flying fish, it came to a halt as the burbling engines stalled out in a cloud of purple smoke.
The boat was built with an interior cage that could resist a herd of overweight elephants. The canopies were more vulnerable. Both Plexiglas covers had been completely ripped off. The cockpits were taking in seas as the boat rocked in the waves.
Zavala coughed out a mouthful of seawater. “You okay?” he asked, a stunned look on his dark, handsome face.
Austin pulled his helmet off to reveal the thick head of platinum, almost white hair. He surveyed the propeller scars on the deck and realized how close they had cut it. “Still among the living,” Austin replied, “but I don’t think the Red Ink was designed to be a convertible.”
Zavala felt the water around his waist. “Time to abandon ship.”
“Consider it an order,” Austin said, loosening his harness. They piled out of the boat into the sea. As part of their certification, racers must pass a dunk test. A cabin cruiser came over and hauled them dripping from the water minutes before the Red Ink went to the bottom.
“What happened to the gold race boat?” Austin asked the cruiser’s owner, a pipe-smoking middle-aged man who had come out of San Diego to watch the race and got more than he bargained for. He pointed off in the distance with the stem of his pipe. “Over there. The guy plowed right through the fleet. Don’t know how he missed hitting the other boats.”
“Mind if we check them out?”
“No problem,” the man said obligingly as he put the wheel over.
Moments later they pulled up alongside the Flying Carpet. The canopies had been pushed back. Austin saw to his relief that the men inside were alive, although blood streamed down Ali’s head where he’d bashed it, and Hank looked as if he were nursing a bad hangover.
Austin called out, “Are you injured?”
“No,” Ali replied, although he didn’t look quite convinced of his own well-being. “What happened?”
“You hit a whale.”
“A what?” When he saw Austin’s serious expression, Ali’s face fell. “Guess we didn’t win,” he said glumly.
“Don’t feel bad,” Austin said. “At least your boat doesn’t lie on the sea floor.”
“Sorry,” Ali said sadly. Then he brightened as a thought hit him. “Then you didn’t win, either.”
“Au contraire,” Austin said. “All four of us won the prize for being the luckiest men alive.”
Ali nodded. “Praise Allah,” he said a second before he passed out.
3
Venezuelan Rain Forest
THE THICK CANOPY of overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun’s rays, making the black water in the still pool seem deeper than it was. Wishing that she hadn’t read that the Venezuelan government was reintroducing man-eating Orinoco crocod
iles into the wild, Gamay Morgan-Trout jackknifed her lithe body in a surface dive and with strong kicks of her slender legs descended into the Stygian darkness. This must be how a prehistoric animal felt sinking into the ooze at the La Brea tar pits in California, Gamay thought. She flicked on the twin halogen lights attached to her Stingray video camera and swam down to the bottom. As she passed over the spinachy vegetation that rose and fell in the slight current as if dancing to music, something poked her in the buttocks.
She whirled around, almost more indignant than scared, her hand going for the sheath knife at her waist. Inches from her face mask was a long, narrow snout attached to a lumpish pink head with small black eyes. The snout waggled back and forth like a scolding finger. Gamay unclenched her hand from the knife hilt and pushed the snout aside.
“Watch it with that thing!” The sentence streamed out the regulator as a stream of noisy bubbles.
The thin beak opened in a friendly, sharp-toothed circus clown’s grin. Then the river dolphin’s face rotated so that it was looking at her upside down.
Gamay laughed, the sounds coming out like the gurgles Old Faithful makes before it erupts. Her thumb pressed the valve that allowed air to inflate her buoyancy compensator. Within seconds her head broke the pool’s calm surface like a jack-in-the-box. She leaned back into her inflated BC, whipped the plastic mouthpiece from between her teeth, and broke into a wide grin.
Paul Trout was sitting in his ten-foot Bombard semi-inflatable boat a few yards away. Doing his job as a dive tender, he had followed the foamy air bursts marking his wife’s underwater trail. He was startled to see her emerge from the black water and nonplussed at her mirth. Lips pursed in puzzlement, he lowered his head in a characteristic pose, as if he were peering up over the tops of invisible spectacles.
“Are you all right?” he said, blinking his large hazel eyes.
“I’m fine,” Gamay said, although clearly she wasn’t. Her laughter was rekindled by the incredulous expression on Paul’s face. She choked on a mouthful of water. The prospect of drowning from laughter made her laugh even more. She popped the mouthpiece back into her mouth. Paul paddled the inflatable closer, leaned over the side, and offered his hand.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. She regained her composure and spat out the regulator. After a fit of wet-dog coughs she said, “I’d better come aboard.”
Clinging to the side of the boat, she handed her dive gear up to Paul, who then reached down and easily lifted her one hundred thirty-five pounds onto the raft. With his tan shorts, matching military-style shirt with epaulets on the shoulders, and floppy brimmed poplin hat, he looked like a Victorian fugitive from the Explorers’ Club. The large tropical butterfly perched below his Adam’s apple was actually one of the colorful bow ties he was addicted to. Trout saw no reason he couldn’t be impeccably dressed anywhere, even in the depths of the Venezuelan rain forest where a loincloth is considered going formal. Paul’s foppish attire belied a potent physical strength built up from his days as a fisherman on Cape Cod. The barnacle-hard calluses on his palms were gone, but the muscles from hoisting fish boxes lurked behind the razor-creased clothes, and he knew how to use the leverage of his six-foot-eight body.
“The depth finder says it’s only thirty feet deep, so your giddiness is not caused by nitrogen narcosis,” he said in his typical analytical way.
Gamay undid the tie holding back the shoulder-length hair whose dark red color had prompted her wine connoisseur father to name his daughter after the grape of Beaujolais.
“Insightful observation, my dear,” she said, wringing the water from her tresses. “I was laughing because I thought I was the sneaker when I was really the sneakee.”
Paul blinked. “What a relief. That certainly clears things up. I know what a sneaker is. Sneakee, on the other hand . . . ”
She flashed a dazzling smile. “Cyrano the dolphin sneaked up and goosed me with his nose.”
“I don’t blame him.” He leered at her slim-hipped body with a Groucho Marx hike of his eyebrows.
“Mother warned me about men who wear bow ties and part their hair in the middle.”
“Did I ever tell you you look like Lauren Hutton?” he said, puffing on an imaginary cigar. “And that I’m attracted to women with a sexy space between their front teeth?”
“Bet you say that to all the girls,” she said, putting a Mae West huskiness into her voice, which was low and cool by nature. “I did learn something scientific from Cyrano’s little love poke.”
“That you have a nose fetish?”
She gave him a no-nonsense lift of her eyebrow. “No, although I wouldn’t rule it out. I learned that river dolphins may be more primitively developed than their saltwater cousins and more mellow in general than their marine relatives. But they are intelligent and playful and have a sense of humor.”
“You would need a sense of humor if you were pink and gray, had flippers with discernible fingers on them, a dorsal fin that’s a joke in itself, and a head like a deformed cantaloupe.”
“Not a bad biological observation for a deep ocean geologist.”
“Glad to be of help.”
She kissed him again, on the lips this time. “I really appreciate your being here. And for all the work you’ve done computer profiling the river. It’s been a nice change. I’m almost sorry to be going home.”
Paul looked around at their tranquil surroundings. “I’ve actually enjoyed it. This place is like a medieval cathedral. And the critters have certainly been fun, although I don’t know if I like them taking liberties with my wife.”
“Cyrano and I have a purely platonic relationship,” Gamay said with a haughty elevation of her chin. “He was just trying to get my attention so I’d give him a treat.”
“A treat?”
“A fish treat.” She slapped the side of the inflatable several times with a paddle. There was a splash where the lagoon opened into the river. A pinkish-gray hump with a long, low dorsal fin cut a V-shaped ripple in their direction. It circled the boat, emitting a sneezing sound from its blowhole. Gamay scattered fish meal pellets, and the slim beak came out of the water and hungrily snapped them down.
“We’ve verified those apocryphal stories of dolphins coming on call. I can imagine them helping the locals with their fishing as we’ve heard.”
“You’ve also proven that Cyrano has done a good job of training you to give him a snack.”
“True, but these creatures are supposed to be unfinished versions of the saltwater type, so it’s of interest to me that their brains have advanced faster than their physical appearance.”
They watched the circling dolphin with amusement for a few minutes, then, aware that the light was waning, decided to head back.
While Gamay arranged her gear, Paul started the outboard motor and headed them out of the lagoon onto the slow-moving river. The inky water changed to a strained-pea green. The dolphin kept pace, but when he saw there would be no more treats, he peeled off like a fighter plane. Before long the thick jungle along the river gave way to a clearing. A handful of thatched huts were grouped around a white stucco house with a red tile roof and arcade façade in the Spanish colonial style.
They tied up at a small pier, hauled their gear from the boat, and walked to the stucco building, trailing a chattering gang of half-naked Indian children. The youngsters were shooed away by the housekeeper, a formidable Spanish-Indian woman who wielded a broom like a battle-ax. Paul and Gamay went inside. A silver-haired man in his sixties, wearing a white shirt with an embroidered front, cotton slacks, and handmade sandals, rose from his desk in the coolness of the study where he had been working on a pile of papers. He strode over to greet them with obvious pleasure.
“Señor and Señora Trout. Good to see you. Your work went well, I trust.”
“Very well, Dr. Ramirez. Thank you,” Gamay said. “I had the chance to catalog more dolphin behavior, and Paul wrapped up his compute
r modeling of the river.”
“I had very little to do with it, actually,” Paul said. “It was mostly a question of alerting researchers at the Amazon Basin project of Gamay’s work here and asking them to point the LandSat satellite in this direction. I can finish the computer modeling when we get home, and Gamay will use it as part of her habitat analysis.”
“I’ll be very sorry to see you go. It was kind of the National Underwater & Marine Agency to lend its experts for a small research project.”
Gamay said, “Without these rivers and the flora and fauna that grow here, there would be no ocean life.”
“Thank you, Señora Gamay. As a way of appreciation I have prepared a special dinner for your last night here.”
“That’s very nice of you,” Paul said. “We’ll pack early so we’ll be ready for the supply boat.”
“I wouldn’t be too concerned,” he said. “The boat is always late.”
“Fine with us,” Paul replied. “We’ll have time to talk some more about your work.”
Ramirez chuckled. “I feel like a troglodyte. I still practice my science of botany the old way, cutting plants, preserving and comparing them, and writing reports nobody reads.” He beamed. “Our little river creatures have never had better friends than you.”
Gamay said, “Perhaps our work will show where the dolphins’ habitat is under environmental threat. Then something can be done about it.”