Tentacles

by Roland Smith

  “Why all the secrecy?” Noah shouted at the receiver.

  “I don’t know,” the woman answered.

  Butch knew. So did Noah Blackwood. A few months earlier NZA had launched an expedition to catch a pair of whale sharks. They might have succeeded if their research ship hadn’t had a mysterious fire that all but destroyed the vessel. When they were towed back into harbor, they found out that their insurance payments weren’t up-to-date, and they lost the ship. Butch had started the fire, and Noah had disrupted the insurance policy. The director of NZA publicly accused Noah Blackwood of sabotage, but few people believed him. Noah’s reputation was restored a week later when NZA had a major failure of their filtration system. NZA tried to call in Travis Wolfe to fix the problem, but he was in South America searching for his sister, Sylvia, and his brother-in-law, Timothy O’Hara — that brat Marty’s parents — after their tragic helicopter crash in the Brazilian Amazon. Noah graciously stepped in to save NZA’s dying fish by loaning his technicians. After this, no one doubted Dr. Blackwood’s intentions. Why would a man sabotage NZA’s expedition, then a week later save the aquarium from total ruin?

  It had been a wonderful year, Butch thought, until the Congo.

  “Get me the details of the giant squid expedition by the end of the day,” Noah said. “Then I suggest you move out of your downtown waterfront condo, which I own, I might add, and get out of town as fast as you can. And leave the keys to the Mini Cooper in the condo. I own that as well. I’ll be waiting.” He ended the call and looked at Butch.

  “NZA is broke,” he said. “They could not possibly have raised the funds to launch an expedition this big without my knowing about it. Which means that Travis Wolfe is fronting them the money and expertise, and getting a percentage of the take if they succeed in bringing in a giant squid alive. He’d make millions of dollars. Dollars that belong to me. With all that money he’d be able to search the world for cryptids for the rest of his miserable life and keep me away from Grace in the process. We have to stop him!”

  “Fire?” Butch asked, smiling. (Butch loved a good fire.)

  “No,” Noah said. “A suspicious fire aboard a second ship would cast the blame back on me. And there’s a chance that Grace might be on board the Coelacanth along with the Mokélé-mbembé eggs. We can’t risk losing Grace — or those eggs.”

  “If the eggs are even fertile,” Butch pointed out. “And if they are, they might have already hatched. Maybe Wolfe won’t take Grace or Marty with him on the expedition. When he leaves, I’ll sneak onto Cryptos Island and grab the hatchlings and your granddaughter.” And even the score with the boy, Butch thought.

  “Travis is not about to leave his only child and the greatest discovery of the last millennium behind on the island,” Noah said angrily. “Your fatal flaw, Butch, is that you have always underestimated Travis Wolfe. That’s how you lost Grace and the eggs in the Congo. Our only chance — your only chance — is to get on that island before they leave and take back what is rightfully mine.”

  “I’ll go tomorrow,” Butch said, already starting to calculate what he would need and how he would do it.

  Noah shook his head. “We need more time. We’re talking about kidnapping. We have to find a place to take Grace where no one will find her. And the eggs or the hatchlings? Where are we going to hide them until we come up with a plausible story as to how they were acquired? I laid the foundation with those reporters, but it will take at least a week to get the rest of the story in place. You are underestimating Travis again. He knows we’re back. He knows that we are going to come after Grace and the eggs. He’s taken precautions.”

  “Like what?” Butch asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. I have people working for me on Cryptos, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with any of them since Travis got back to the island. And don’t think that Travis hasn’t documented his discovery. He has records of those eggs. Videos, scientific data, photos … We would have to take everything he has so he couldn’t come back at us and prove that we stole his discovery. The only mistake Travis made in the Congo was letting us live. He should have put a bullet in our heads — and that’s Travis Wolfe’s fatal flaw. He’s a coward at heart. He is incapable of pulling a trigger unless he’s holding a tranquilizer gun.”

  “I don’t have that flaw,” Butch said. “I’ll pull a real trigger on Wolfe the second I get him in my sights.”

  Noah laughed sarcastically. “You don’t think Travis knows that? Just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean he’s stupid. Travis started planning what he was going to do the moment he commandeered our chopper and ditched us in the jungle. The problem is that I don’t know what his plan is, and until I do, we cannot move on him. We need to —”

  A buzzer sounded on the desk. Irritated, Noah punched a button on his keyboard. “What is it?”

  “There’s someone here to see you,” a woman’s voice replied. “He says it’s urgent. He said to tell you that he’s from the island.”

  Noah Blackwood smiled. “Send him right up.”

  A minute later there was a knock on Noah’s door. He opened it, and a little man stepped inside.

  “What’s going on?” Noah asked without saying hello.

  “Wolfe told everyone on Cryptos that you and Butch had died in the Congo,” the man said.

  Noah looked at Butch. “See? Travis knew we had people on the island. If he convinced them that we were dead they wouldn’t try to get in touch with us. What would be the point?” He turned back to the man and narrowed his blue eyes. “But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t answer my calls. I’ve tried to reach you and the others a hundred times since I got out of the Congo.”

  “Total blackout,” the man said. “No calls to or off the island without authorization. Ted Bronson set up some kind of jamming device that fried the satellite phones you gave us. And Wolfe hired some security specialist named Albert Ikes. Ex-military —”

  “I think he’s ex–Central Intelligence Agency,” Noah corrected. “I’ve heard of him. He’s one of the best in the business, and his services are very expensive.”

  “Whoever he is, he brought in a paramilitary outfit,” the man continued. “Cryptos Island is like an armed fortress. Only a handful of people have been let off the island since Wolfe returned, and even those are under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

  “How’d you get off the island?” Butch asked.

  The man smiled up at him. “My size,” he said. “I’ve been working aboard the Coelacanth for the past week. Phil Bishop has been shuttling supplies and people onto the island several times a day. During his last haul I squeezed into the cargo area of his seaplane. I don’t know how much time I have, or whether I can smuggle myself back onto the seaplane. When we heard you were alive last night on TV, we decided one of us had to get off Cryptos and tell you what’s going on — even if it meant not getting back onto the island.”

  “Good work,” Noah said. “Excellent! How long before they miss you?”

  The man looked at his watch. “I have someone covering for me on the ship. I’ll have to be back on board in a few hours or they’ll know I left.” He reached under his shirt collar and pulled out a black-and-white tracking tag. “And then there’s this thing. They do random tracking checks. If they do one while I’m here, the game is up. They’ll never let me back on the ship or the island.”

  “How often do they check?”

  The man shrugged. “No one knows.”

  “We’ll get you back,” Noah said confidently. “Now tell me what you know about the expedition.”

  “They’re shipping out tonight,” the man said.

  “Tonight!” Noah shouted.

  “That’s why I jumped ship,” the man hurriedly explained. “We didn’t know we were leaving tonight until this afternoon. We thought we had two weeks.”

  “What about the eggs?” Noah asked.

  “What eggs?”

  Noah’s face flushed in anger. “What did
they have on board the jet when they returned from the Congo?”

  “I don’t know,” the man answered. “As soon as the jet landed, they towed it into the hangar and closed the doors. No one was allowed in. The next day several employees were given a pay bonus and laid off. Most of us left on Cryptos were sent down to the Coelacanth and we haven’t been allowed back on the island since.”

  “And Grace?”

  “Wolfe’s niece?” the man asked. “I haven’t seen her. She hasn’t been down to the ship, that I know of. But I did see Wolfe’s nephew, Marty, today. Phil Bishop flew in a friend of his.”

  “So, Grace is probably still on the island,” Noah said. “Is Wolfe taking the kids with him?”

  “Definitely,” the man said. “They’re in adjoining cabins. One for Grace, and one for Marty and his pal. I hauled his stuff aboard and stowed it in Marty’s cabin just before I slipped off the ship.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?” Noah asked.

  The man smiled. “Yeah, I got a chance to go through the kid’s junk. His name is Luther Smyth. He was Marty’s roomie at that private school they went to in Switzerland. I copied some information down.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and gave it to Noah. “Parents’ names, addresses, etc. I don’t know if it will do you any good.”

  Noah scanned the piece of paper. “Anything else?”

  “One of his suitcases was crammed with diaries. Hundreds of them, but they weren’t his. They belong to Grace. He must have hauled them all the way from Switzerland.”

  “Did you take any?”

  “Couldn’t,” the man answered. “They’re numbered. I figured she’d know if I lifted one.”

  “Did you go through Grace’s cabin?”

  The man shook his head. “I was going to toss it, but there was this gray attack parrot in the cabin sitting on a perch. It came at me screaming its black beak off. You could hear it all over the ship. I had to get out of there quick so I didn’t get caught.”

  Butch rubbed his hand where the parrot had bitten him back in the Congo. I should have thrown him against the tree harder, he thought.

  “How many people are on the ship?” Noah asked.

  “I’m not sure. Counting the crew, maybe fifty or so. They’ve flown in scientists and technicians from all over the world. I don’t know a third of them.”

  “Who’s covering for you on the ship?”

  The man told him.

  Noah smiled. “Excellent. You did well. Why don’t you wait downstairs. Butch will be down in a minute, and he’ll get you back onto the island.”

  After the man left, Noah stared at Butch for a long time.

  “What?” Butch asked, beginning to sweat in the air-conditioned room.

  “I want you to shave your mustache,” Noah said.

  He might as well have asked Butch to cut off his right arm — Butch had had the mustache for almost as long.

  “We’ll have to make some other changes as well, but I think we can pull it off.”

  “What are you talking about?” Butch asked.

  Noah Blackwood told Butch what he had in mind.

  * * *

  Marty and Luther roared down the hill and screeched to a stop in front of a metal Quonset hut large enough to store five ships the size of the Coelacanth.

  “Is this the jet hangar?” Luther asked.

  Marty shook his head and pointed back toward the Fort. “The jet hangar’s over there next to Lost Lake.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Luther said, grinning. “That’s where they keep the dolphins that you thought were sharks.”

  “It wasn’t funny,” Marty said. “I almost drowned. And your illustration of the incident was awful.”

  Luther continued to grin. He and Marty had been swapping insults like this their whole lives. “At least in my drawing they looked like dolphins,” he said.

  “Bo’s probably down at the lake,” Marty continued, ignoring the retort. “She hates the dolphins and loves to tease them, but I wanted to show you where Ted Bronson lives before we ship out. The building is called the QAQ, the Question and Answer Quonset, which is where eWolfe does all of its research and development.”

  The boys looked at the armed guard standing outside a little gate built into one of the ginormous sliding doors.

  “Is that the only way in?” Luther asked.

  “Yep,” Marty answered. “I’ve been around the building a dozen times. No windows to peek through, either. It’s like a giant vault.”

  “And Ted Bronson’s never been out?”

  Marty shook his head. “Not in years.”

  “I take it he’s not going to New Zealand with us, then,” Luther said.

  “Duh du jour,” Marty said. “Ted’s a total recluse. I don’t even know what he looks like. He’s not about to sail across the Pacific Ocean.”

  “So, what kind of things do they research and develop?” Luther asked.

  “Amazing things,” Marty said. “I was going to wait and show you this later, but it might help us find Bo.” He pulled something about the size of a handheld video game player out of his pocket.

  “Is that the Gizmo?” Luther burst out. “The way you described it, I thought it’d be smaller.”

  “The other Gizmos are smaller,” Marty said. “This one’s a prototype that Ted came up with. It has a function that none of the other Gizmos have.”

  The regular Gizmo had video conferencing, email, web browsing, an encrypted satellite phone, a global positioning system, and a digital camera, as well as the ability to track people and animals wearing tags, and linkups to the video cameras the animal scouts wore, among dozens of other functions.

  “What does yours do that the others don’t?” Luther asked.

  Marty hit a button on the Gizmo that said WAKE. A little drawer on the top of the Gizmo slid open. Inside was something that looked like it was made of gold.

  “What is it?” Luther asked.

  “Ted calls it a bot-fly,” Marty answered. “But I call it a dragon-spy. It takes a while for the little bug to get moving, but when it gets into gear it can dart around as fast as a bullet.”

  “Yeah,” Luther said impatiently. “But what is it?”

  “It’s a micro-robot. That’s where the word bot comes from.”

  “It flies?” Luther asked.

  “It does a lot more than that,” Marty answered. “I told you about how Wolfe puts cameras on Bo and the raven, Vid, and the dolphins?”

  Luther nodded.

  “He lets them go free when he’s looking for cryptids,” Marty said. “When we were in the Congo, the animal scouts kept an eye on things, including Grace and me when we got in trouble. Bo became our eyes in the trees. Vid was our eyes in the sky. Wolfe’s taking the dolphins with us to New Zealand, and they’ll be our eyes beneath the sea. The problem is that Wolfe can’t control where the animal scouts go or what they look at. So Ted created a robot that will go exactly where we want it to go. There’s a micro-camera built into its eyes and it can even pick up audio, but I haven’t figured out how to use that yet.”

  “You’re lying,” Luther said.

  The tiny golden bot started to move — or actually to unfold. Its head came out from under a wing and its camera-like eyes blinked. It stretched its right wing out, then its left. The golden wings shuddered, then began vibrating with a buzzing sound. A second pair of wings unfolded behind the first set. The bot stood up and stretched its six legs as if it were getting the kinks out of them.

  “I can see why you call it a dragonspy,” Luther said. “It looks just like a dragonfly.”

  “It flies like one, too,” Marty said. “It can stop on a dime, fly upside down, hover —”

  “Is it made out of gold?” Luther interrupted.

  Marty shook his head. “It’s a special alloy Ted invented. I don’t know what it’s made out of, but it’s as light as a feather.”

  “It must have cost millions of dollars to research and develop,” Luther s
aid. “No offense, but why would they give it to you?”

  “Because no one else can fly it without crashing it. Ted made three bots altogether. They wrecked the first two in the hangar by flying them into walls. I asked Wolfe and a couple of Ted’s geeks if I could try my luck with the third. They of course said no way, then Wolfe’s Gizmo rang. He listened for a moment then said, ‘Are you sure, Ted?’ Then he handed me the last bot and the docking Gizmo.”

  “Ted Bronson was in the hangar?”

  Marty shook his head. “He must have been watching the disaster by video from the QAQ. Anyway, at first the dragonspy was a little hard to maneuver, but I managed to fly it for half an hour without squishing it. The controls are pretty touchy. When it gets out of control, the trick is to put it into hover mode until you figure out what to do next.”

  The bot turned its tiny head toward them. Marty hit a button on the Gizmo, and Luther and Marty’s faces appeared on the Gizmo screen.

  “Any chance I can try?” Luther asked.

  “Sorry,” Marty said. “Wolfe said that I’m the only one who can fly it. If I break the rule, he’ll pull my wings. Now let’s see what Bo and PD are up to.”

  The dragonspy took off. Marty had it do a couple of wide 360s, then put it into a hover about a hundred feet above their heads.

  Luther looked down at the Gizmo screen and saw a video of himself and Marty standing far below. “What powers it?”

  “The wings have solar collectors that charge a series of microscopic batteries. It’ll fly all day long outside. Inside it’ll fly for an hour or two. If the juice gets low, you have to land it near a lightbulb to recharge.” He pointed at a small gauge on the Gizmo screen. It read 4:37. “When we got back from the Congo, Ted took all the Gizmos back and converted the batteries to charge on solar, too. Mine has about four and a half hours left. When we were in the jungle, Wolfe’s battery conked out and we lost touch with him, and no one wants that to happen again.”