Beast

  Life for Sharp was rich, varied and fun.

  But in the past year and a half, variety and fun had ceased to satisfy.

  Part of his problem, he knew, was an unwillingness to confront the specter of becoming a grown-up. He was twenty-nine and hadn’t given much thought to thirty, certainly hadn’t been afraid of it, until a few months before, when he had been rejected in his application to join the navy’s elite, high-risk, high-demand amphibious guerrillas, the SEALs. He was too old.

  But at the core of his discontent lay the only thing close to tragedy that Marcus Sharp had ever known.

  He had fallen in love with a United Airlines flight attendant, a skier and scuba diver, and they had been all over the world together. They were young and immortal. Marriage was a possibility but not a necessity. They lived in and for the present.

  And then one September day in 1989, they were snorkeling off a beach in North Queensland. They had heard routine warnings about dangerous animals, but they hadn’t been worried. They had been swimming with sharks and rays and barracudas; they could take care of themselves. The sea was a world not of danger but of adventure and discovery.

  They had seen a turtle swimming by, and they had followed it, trying to keep up with it. The turtle had slowed and opened its mouth, as if to eat something, though they saw nothing, and they glided up to it, entranced by its grace and efficiency in the water.

  Karen had reached out to touch it, to stroke its shell, and as Sharp watched she suddenly convulsed and arched her back and clawed at her breast. Her snorkel slipped from her mouth. Her eyes went wide and she screamed, tearing at her own flesh.

  Sharp grabbed her and pulled her to the surface and tried to get her to speak, but all she could do was shriek.

  By the time he got her to shore, she was dead.

  The turtle had been feeding on sea wasps, box jellyfish all but invisible in the water, colonies of nematocysts so toxic that a brush with them could stop a human heart. And so it had.

  When Karen had been buried in Indiana and Sharp’s grief had begun to scar over, he had found himself possessed by darker thoughts, thoughts of the randomness of fate. It wasn’t a matter of injustice or unfairness—he had never thought of life as fair or unfair; it simply was. But fate was capricious. They were not immortal; nothing was forever.

  He had become plagued by the emptiness of his life, the lack of focus. He had done many things, but to no purpose.

  He had an image of himself as a steel ball on a pinball machine, popping in and out of one hole after another, going nowhere.

  The navy had given him the best billet available, a two-year tour in Bermuda—sunny, comfortable, undemanding and only two hours from the U.S. mainland. Quiet, however, was not what Sharp needed. He needed action, but now action alone wasn’t enough: There had to be a point, a purpose to it.

  In Bermuda, he had found nothing much to do except shuffle papers and occasionally fly around in a helicopter and hope that someone needed rescuing.

  From time to time, he thought of quitting the navy, but he had no idea what he would do. Civilian life had few slots for helicopter pilots expert in blowing up bridges.

  Meanwhile, he volunteered for any task that would keep his mind off himself.

  He was heading northwest now, intending to set a search pattern from the northwest to the north to the northeast and then the east, all on the north side of the island. He turned his UHF radio to 243.0 and his VHF to 121.5, the two frequencies over which emergency equipment broadcast. He flew at five hundred feet.

  Six miles off the island, where the reefs ended and the water changed from dappled turquoise to deep cerulean, he heard a beep—very faint, very distant, but persistent. He looked at the copilot, tapped his earphones, and the copilot nodded and gave him a thumbs-up sign. Sharp scanned his instruments, turning the helicopter slowly from side to side until he found the direction in which the beeping from his radio direction finder was loudest. He took a bearing from the compass.

  Then a voice came over his marine radio.

  “Huey One … Huey One … Huey One … this is Privateer … come back.”

  “Privateer … Huey One …” Sharp smiled. “Hey, Whip … where you at?”

  “Right underneath you, lad. Don’t you keep your eyes on the road?”

  “Had my eyes on the future.”

  “Going for an outing?”

  “B.A. pilot picked up an EPIRB signal a while ago. You hear anything?”

  “Not a peep. How far out?”

  “Ten, fifteen miles. I’ve got it on one-twenty-one-five now. Whatever it is, northwest wind’s pushing it back this way.”

  “Maybe I’ll chase your wake.”

  Sharp hesitated, then said, “Okay, do that, Whip. Who knows? Might use your help.”

  “Done and done, Marcus. Privateer standing by.”

  Good, Sharp thought. If there was a boat sinking out there, Whip would arrive a lot faster than any vessel summoned from the base. If it was an abandoned boat, a lifeboat, say, SOP would call for him to put a diver down to investigate. The weather was decent, but putting a diver down from a helicopter in the open ocean under any conditions involved risk. He wouldn’t hesitate to go himself, but he didn’t relish putting a nineteen-year-old down into the sea all alone. Whip could check it out for him while he went in search of floaters. If they found people, alive or dead, he’d have to put the diver down, and he wanted the boy to be fresh.

  Besides, maybe there’d be something worthwhile for Whip if nobody claimed it. A raft. A radio. A flare gun. Something worth selling or using, something to get Whip money or save him money. And Sharp knew Whip needed it.

  Besides, Sharp thought, I owe him one.

  One? Hell, he owed Whip Darling about a hundred.

  Whip had saved Sharp’s sanity, at a time when there was a better-than-even chance of his becoming a blob, an addict of entertainments like Surf Nazis Must Die and Amazon Women on the Moon. His weekends had become unbearable. He had dived with every commercial tour group on the island, ridden a motorbike around every square inch of the place, visited every fort and museum, spent money in every saloon—he had no moral objection to becoming a drunk, but he had no tolerance for liquor and didn’t like the taste of it—and seen every movie in the base video store except those involving the ax murder of baby-sitters. He read for hours every day, till his eyes rebelled and his ass atrophied. He was on the brink of doing the unthinkable— taking up golf—when he met Whip at a base function.

  He had listened, fascinated, to Whip’s discourse on the techniques of discovering shipwrecks and had asked enough intelligent questions to secure an invitation to come out on the boat some Sunday … which had quickly become every Sunday and most Saturdays. As he listened to Whip, he learned, and, curiously, he found himself becoming ashamed of his education. For, here was a man with six years’ schooling who had taught himself to be not just a fisherman and a diver but a historian and a biologist and a numismatist and… well, a walking encyclopedia of the sea.

  Sharp had offered to contribute to the cost of Darling’s fuel and been turned down; he had offered to help paint the boat and been accepted, which pleased him because it made him feel like a participant instead of a parasite. Then Whip had shown him photographs of what old shipwrecks looked like from the air, and suddenly—as if a door had cracked open, lighting a corner of his mind he had not known was there—he saw the prospect of new interests, new goals.

  Whip taught him not to look for the classic fairy-tale image of a shipwreck—the ship upright and ready on its keel, sails rigged, tricorn-hatted skeletons sitting where they died gambling over a stack of doubloons. The old ships had been wooden, and, for the most part, the ones that hit Bermuda sank in shallow water. Storm seas broke them to pieces, and centuries of moving water had dispersed them and pressed them into the bottom, and the bottom had absorbed them and corals grew on them, taking the dead to their bosoms.

  There were three main telltales, Whip h
ad said, to a shipwreck on the bottom. When a ship was driven over the reefs—flung by the wind, shoved by a following sea—it would crush the reef, kill the fragile corals and leave a scrub mark that, from a couple of hundred feet in the air, would look like a giant tire track.

  A sharp eye might see a cannon or two, overgrown and coral-encrusted and looking like not much more than an unlikely mass in an unnaturally straight line. There was truth to the old saying that nature doesn’t like straight lines. But the presence of a cannon didn’t always mean the ship itself was nearby, because when a vessel was in its last throes, often the crew would heave everything heavy overboard to keep her from capsizing. It was possible to find a cannon here, an anchor there, and no ship at all if the sea had carried her miles away before slamming her down and busting her to bits in her last resting place.

  What was a dead giveaway—visible from the air but most difficult to identify—was a ballast pile, for Whip insisted that where a ship dropped her ballast was where she had died. Yes, her deck might have drifted away, or her rigging, carrying a survivor or two, but her heart and soul—her cargo, her treasure—lay with her ballast. Usually, the old-timers ballasted with river rocks from the Thames or the Ebro or one of the other rivers near their home ports. The rocks were smooth and round and small enough for a man to lift. Think of cobblestones, Whip told Sharp, because all the cobblestones in places like Nantucket had been ballast stones, carried in the bowels of a ship to keep her upright on her way over from England, then replaced with barrels of oil for the journey home.

  So what Sharp conditioned himself to look for was a gathering of very round stones all piled together, often in a white sand hole between dark coral heads, for Whip had taught him that an old ship would have struck the coral head and stuck there until another sea came along and broke her loose and cast her innards into the sand, which would embrace them and cover them over.

  Now Sharp never missed a chance to fly, and whenever he flew—whether supposedly to keep his hours up, or to train new pilots, or to test new equipment—he always kept an eye out for shipwrecks. He flew as low as possible, yawing back and forth to keep the sun’s rays at a cutting angle through the shallow seas, and if one of his crew ever asked what the hell he was doing, he would reply with something vague like, Putting her through her paces.

  So far, he had found two ballast piles, two shipwrecks. One, Whip said, had been explored in the sixties. One was new. They’d go have a dig on it one of these days.

  The beeping was loud and regular now, and Sharp could see something yellow sliding up and down the rolling seas. He pushed the collective-power-control lever down, and dropped the helicopter to a hundred feet.

  It was a raft, small and empty and apparently undamaged. He circled it, careful to stay high enough so that the downdraft from his rotors didn’t start it spinning or capsize it off the top of a wave.

  “Privateer … Huey One …”

  “Yeah, Marcus …” came Whip’s voice.

  “It’s a raft. Nobody aboard. Just a raft. Could’ve fallen off a boat. Some of those EPIRBs are salt-water activated.”

  “Whyn’t you let me pick it up with my davit? I’ll cruise around, see if there’s any swimmers, then bring it to shore. Nobody has to get wet.”

  “You got it. It’s three-four-oh from where you were. Should be here in an hour or so. Meantime, we’ll set a search grid and swing back and forth till fuel sends us home.”

  “Roger that, Marcus.”

  “False alarm, I guess. But the land of the free and the home of the brave is grateful to you anyway, Whip.”

  “My pleasure. Privateer standing by… .”

  8

  “MAYBE THE DAY isn’t a dead loss after all,” Darling said as he climbed the ladder to the flying bridge.

  “Why’s that?” Mike was stowing the last of the coiled wire leaders.

  “Got us a chance to pick up a raft. If she’s a Switlik and nobody’s name’s on her, there’s a couple thousand, maybe more.”

  “Somebody’ll claim it. They always do.”

  “Probably … the way our luck’s been running.”

  They raised the raft in less than an hour, and Darling made a slow circle around it, studying it like a specimen on a laboratory slide.

  “Switlik,” he said, pleased.

  “Looks brand-new off the shelf, like nobody was ever on it.”

  “That, or they were rescued right quick.” Darling saw none of the normal signs that people had spent time in the raft: no dirt, no scuff marks from rubber shoes, no fish blood from anything they’d caught, no bits of clothing.

  “Sharks got ‘em?” Mike said.

  Darling shook his head. “Shark would’ve bit through the rubber, collapsed one of the cells, maybe burred it with his skin. You’d see it.”

  “What, then?”

  “Whale, maybe.” Darling kept circling as he pondered that possibility. Killer whales had been known to attack rafts, dinghies, even big boats. Nobody knew why, because they’d never gone on and attacked the people; there had never been a true case of an orca eating a human being. Perhaps they just got to playing with a raft and, like a kid who had grown too fast, they didn’t know their own strength.

  Humpback whales had killed people, but always by accident. They had come up to rafts out of curiosity, to see what they were, and gotten underneath and given a flip with their tails, and people had been flung to death.

  “No,” Darling said, dismissing the thought. “Everything would be upside down and akimbo.”

  Mike said, “Could be she just slipped off the deck and fell in the ocean.”

  “Then what turned on the EPIRB?” Darling pointed to the Styrofoam-cased beacon. “That’s not automatic. Somebody turned it on.”

  “Maybe a ship picked the folks up and they forgot to turn it off.”

  “And nobody bothered to report in to Bermuda?” Darling paused. “Gun to my head, I’d say their boat sank out from under ‘em, and they tossed the raft in the sea and jumped for it and missed and drowned themselves.”

  Mike seemed to like that answer, so Darling didn’t articulate the hazy idea he had of another option. No point in stirring up bad thoughts in Mike. Besides, speculation was usually bullshit.

  “Well, the good news is,” Darling said, “she’s a brand-spanking-new Switlik, worth enough to keep the wolves at bay for a little while.”

  They snagged the raft with a grappling hook, fixed the rope to the block-and-tackle rig on the davit, turned on the winch and hauled it aboard.

  Mike knelt down and poked around, opening the supply box in the bow, feeling under the rubber cells.

  “Best turn off the EPIRB,” Darling said as he removed the hook and coiled the rope. “Don’t want a lot of pilots baffled by emergency signals when they should be caring for their hangovers.”

  Mike flicked the switch on the beacon and pushed the antenna back inside. He stood up. “Nothing. Nothing missing, nothing wrong.”

  “No.” But something was bothering Darling, and he continued to stare at the raft, comparing the inventory of what he saw to what he knew he should be seeing.

  The oar. That was it. There wasn’t any. Every raft carried at least one oar, and this one had been meant to have oars; there were oarlocks. But no oar.

  And then, as the boat shifted slightly, his eye was attracted to sunlight glinting off something on one of the rubber cells. He bent over and put his face close to the rubber. There were scratch marks, as if a knife had cut the rubber but hadn’t gone all the way through, and around each scratch mark, shining in the sun, was a patch of some kind of slime. He touched his fingers to the slime and raised them to his nose.

  “What?” Mike said.

  Darling hesitated, then decided to lie. “Sunburn oil. Poor buggers were worried about their tans.”

  He had no idea what it was. It stank of ammonia.

  Darling called Sharp on the radio and told him he had the raft and intended to keep searching, a bit
farther to the north. A person in the water, alive or dead, had no sail area, so he or she wouldn’t have traveled nearly as far as the raft had—might, in fact, have moved in the opposite direction from the raft, depending on the current.

  And so they drove north for an hour—ten miles, more or less—then turned south and began to zigzag from southwest to southeast. Mike stood on the bow, his eyes on the nearby surface and the few feet below it, while Darling scanned the distance from the flying bridge.

  They had just turned eastward, away from the sun, when Mike called out, “There!” and pointed off the port side.

  Twenty or thirty yards away, something big and glisteny was floating in a tangle of sargasso weed.

  Darling slowed and turned toward it. As they closed on it, they saw that the thing, whatever it was, was not man-made. It bobbed slowly and had a wet sheen and quivered like Jell-O.

  “What the hell is that?” said Mike.

  “Looks like a six-foot jellyfish snarled itself in the weed.”

  “Damn! Don’t want to run into him.”

  Darling put the boat in neutral and watched from the flying bridge as the thing slid down the side. It was a huge clear jelly oblong, with a hole in the middle, and it appeared to have some sort of life, for it rotated as if to expose new parts of itself to the sunlight every few seconds.

  Mike said, “No jellyfish I’ve ever seen.”

  “No,” Darling agreed. “Beats me. Spawn of some kind, I guess.”

  “Want to pick some up?”

  “What for?”

  “The aquarium?”

  “No. They never asked me for spawn. If it is spawn, let’s let the critters live, whatever they are.”

  Darling resumed his course to the southeast. By the time they reached the area where they had recovered the raft, they had found two seat cushions and a rubber fender.