A disturbing fact nagged at me, though. The whistling sound hadn’t come from beneath the lake. It had seemed to originate in the swamp far beyond the shoreline. But sound plays tricks when filtered through water or when reverberating through limestone. It was also possible that Tomlinson and the kid had followed a karst vein beyond the perimeter of the lake. Even so, I would have to start where they had started—underwater, in that damn tunnel.
It wouldn’t have been an easy operation even with a chopper standing by and a fully manned rescue team. Alone, the difficulties were too many to list. Finding Will and Tomlinson wouldn’t be easy, but, if I did, that’s when the real work would begin. With only one extra tank and regulator, we would have to somehow buddy-breathe through the tunnel, then back to the surface. I couldn’t picture how that was possible in a conduit so narrow, but if I found them we would have to manage.
All I knew for certain was that they were alive and I had to hurry. A true air bell—a pocket of air trapped in a rock chamber beneath the water’s surface—would keep them alive for only a short amount of time. Because of that, it was pointless to dwell on the obstacles. I had an objective. I would move toward it. Sometimes, circumstances demand that you step off the high board and deal with water issues while en route to your destination. Sometimes, difficulties that can’t be controlled become tolerable only when viewed as assets.
Looking at it that way, I had a lot going for me.
I was alone—it meant I didn’t have a partner to worry about. The fact that there was a single spare tank meant that I didn’t have to lug a lot of extra equipment. The tunnel was claustrophobic, it was potentially deadly, but if Will and Tomlinson had made it then chances were good that I could find my way through the maze, too.
King and Perry? I told myself that they were additional motivation. I was tired, my nerves were raw and I was scared—but not of the animal we’d heard banging around in the brush. I was afraid that if I failed underwater, I’d miss the opportunity to deal with King and Perry one-on-one when I returned to the surface.
With that kind of motivation, failure wasn’t an option.
As I stood to collect the last of my gear, Perry asked me, “What do you think that hissing noise was? Seriously.” He was pacing between the truck and the shoreline, the rifle cradled beneath his arm as if he were hunting pheasants. The man’s eyes never stopped moving, and he rammed the words together, talking faster than he had an hour earlier. If he was using drugs, I guessed it was some type of amphetamine. I also guessed that he had amped up recently.
I said, “What’s it matter? You’ve got a gun, and you can always hide in the truck.”
The man nodded, oblivious to the veiled slight.
I knelt to secure the octopus hose on the spare regulator. As I did, King moved close enough to grab my night vision mask, then backed away a safe distance before inspecting it. “How do you turn this gizmo on?”
“Put it down,” I snapped.
He had the mask pressed against his face as he felt around for the switch. “This is a pretty fancy piece of equipment for a nerd like you to be carrying. How much this thing set you back?”
I was walking toward King, intending to take it away from him, when he found the monocular’s switch. After a pause, he said, “Goddamn, Perry, you gotta take a look through this thing! It’s like daylight, all of a sudden . . . And you can see about ten times as many stars!”
The man began turning in a circle, looking at the sky, then he stopped and aimed the monocular into the shadows of the swamp. After a moment, he said, “Holy shit! There’s something out there!” He paused. “What the hell are those things?”
I stared into the darkness as Perry said, “What do you see? Is it that animal we heard? Damn it, let me look, it’s my turn!”
They sounded like two kids squabbling over a toy.
In my bag, I had a palm-sized flashlight, an ASP Triad, ultrabright. I switched it on, then listened to King complain, “Dumb-ass, now you scared them!,” as Perry whispered, “Jesus Christ, I see them. There must be three or four. What are they?”
Across the lake, staring back at me, were three sets of orange eyes bright as coals. I thought they were small crocodiles at first. As I watched, the animals turned and crashed through the brush toward the swamp. They were reptilian, low to the ground, like crocs, but their movements were snakelike. All three possessed a dense, four-legged musculature, yet they moved over the ground as if swimming on their bellies. As they ran, they held their heads erect like cobras.
In an amphetamine rush, Perry said to me, “They’re too small to make that crashing sound we heard. Don’t you think? Unless, maybe, they were all running around together. Hey—Ford! What do you think they are? Like, little alligators or something?”
With the flashlight, I tracked the animals into the brush before I switched it off. “I think they’re Nile monitor lizards,” I told him. “They’re all about the same size, four or five feet long—so they’re probably from the same hatch.”
“Hatch?”
I said, “Monitors lay eggs.”
King said, “You think they’re monitor lizards? What the hell’s that mean?”
I stared at him without answering as Perry said, “Monitor lizards? I never even heard of ’em.”
I replied, “Pet-store people started importing monitors from Africa fifteen or twenty years ago and they sold a lot of them cheap. Some escaped, they bred, now they’re all over Florida. In some counties, there’s a bounty on them.”
“No shit! So they’re dangerous? If they pay a bounty, they’ve gotta be dangerous. Maybe there’s a bigger one around. Do they hiss?”
No doubt about it, Perry was speeding his brains out and his tongue had to work fast to keep up. I told him, “They kill small dogs, they eat bird’s eggs. They eat rodents, too—so you better stay on your toes.”
Perry said, “Rodents, huh?” Then he said, “Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?”
King was laughing. I didn’t reply.
“Fucking pet stores,” Perry muttered, sounding nervous. “You gotta be shitting me. Are they poisonous? Like snakes? They remind me of snakes, the way they move.”
I wasn’t in the mood to engage in conversation with Perry. I was still staring at King. “Turn off the monocular and give me my dive mask. I’m not going to ask again.”
King said, “Or you’ll do what?” He was still laughing as he pretended to use the monocular to focus on me. “You got a gun or knife hidden somewhere? You’re all talk, Jock-a-mo. If I don’t give you the mask, you’ll do what?”
“Quit screwing around!” Perry yelled. “I’m tired of your shit! Give him his goddamn mask!”
I had taken two steps toward King when he held out a palm, stopping me, then said, “Sure, Jock-o, you can have your mask. Here.” He lobbed it high over my head.
I could hear him laughing as I hurried to retrieve the mask from the lake before it sank.
For more than an hour, Arlis Futch had not spoken a word, but now he called from the shadows, “Ford! You watch yourself when you go into that lake. You hear me?”
I was in knee-deep water, wearing my BC, bottle strapped on, my night vision mask tilted up on my forehead and my hands full of spare gear. There was something unusual about the old man’s voice, a quality that was menacing, serious and real. It caused even Perry, who had been jabbering nonstop, to go silent.
I called back, “How’re you feeling, Arlis?”
He coughed—returning to his role as a sick old man, maybe—and said, “Those scum ought to at least let you carry a knife. You got your knife?”
No, Perry had my knife. It was still stuck in his belt. I couldn’t tell if Arlis was actually warning me about something dangerous in the water or if it was a ploy designed to rearm me.
King hollered at him, “Shut up and mind your own business, Gramps. What you’d better be worried about is your boyfriend coming back with more of those Cuban pesos.”
I cal
led to Arlis, “I’ll be fine, don’t worry,” before saying to Perry, “We have a deal, right?” Intentionally, I said it loud enough for King to hear.
King said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
What it meant was that he had left Perry and me alone long enough to discuss the jet dredge. I had asked Perry what it would take to convince him that they stood to profit by helping me. More coins is what Perry wanted. Give him proof, he had told me, and he would force King back into the water to handle the hose.
Playing it off, Perry said to me, “Sure, sure, whatever you say. Just do your part.”
As I backed into the water, my fins feeling for balance on the slick rocks, I heard King asking, “What’s he talking about? What deal? Did you two cook up something behind my back?”
I rinsed my mask, fitted it onto my face and flipped the switch on the night vision monocular, the lens of which was hinged tightly against the faceplate.
“Give me ten minutes,” I said, looking at Perry. “I’ll keep my part of the bargain.”
That really galled King. He was still interrogating Perry as I lay back, allowing the buoyancy of water to float me, and began to kick toward the middle of the lake.
I was carrying one oversized LED spotlight and two smaller lights clipped to my BC, but I didn’t need them to see now. My right eye is dominant, but I preferred to wear the night vision monocular over my left. When I closed my right, it was like looking through a magic green tube. The night bloomed bright with details. I could see Arlis sitting up, watching me from the distance. The cypress trees above him were isolated and set apart from the starry skyline, their leaves iridescent and waxy.
When I turned my head, the swamp gloom was illuminated, and I could see that two of the monitor lizards had returned. The animals were perched on the high bank among cattails, tongues flicking, probing air molecules for a scent of prey or the warning scent of predators. Their eyes no longer glowed. Through the monocular, their reptilian eyes appeared as opaque as the eyes of a snake that was shedding its skin.
In reality, I was not looking through the monocular. I was seeing an amplified electronic image on a phosphor screen. The device collected a broad spectrum of light, intensified it, then reassembled real-time images that produced the illusion that it was high noon as if viewed through a Heineken bottle, not a windy, starry February night.
Underwater, the monocular would be even more effective once I activated the built-in infrared light. The infrared was invisible to anyone or anything not equipped with night vision, and the unit was waterproof to a hundred feet.
As I swam toward the marker buoy, I gave some thought to the Nile monitor lizards that were still watching me from shore. The monitor is a foul-tempered pet and a prolific breeder that has, over the years, caused too many impulse buyers to dump their purchases along the sides of the road rather than risk their cats or dogs being killed and eaten. Monitors are superb swimmers, they can scramble up trees, they nest in unseen burrows and they will eat just about anything that moves—or doesn’t move fast enough.
The Nile monitor is a relentless diurnal predator that hunts in packs when necessary—and there is no shortage of prey in the suburbs of the Sunshine State. On its native continent, monitors are hunted for food by crocs and by humans. In Florida, though, where filet of lizard tail isn’t on the menu, the animal has been allowed to ascend to the position of an alpha predator. That’s why it has multiplied so rapidly throughout the state.
The lizards didn’t cause me any uneasiness, though. They were the size of bulldogs, although twice as heavy. Even if there had been a dozen of them, I doubted if they would have risked attacking a full-grown man. Had I been in Indonesia, though, not the pasturelands of Florida, my reaction would have been much different.
I had spent time in Indonesia and so I knew from experience.
On the islands surrounding Pulau Komodo, there lives a close relative of the animals that were now watching me. There, as in Florida, the monitors have no natural predators, so they have evolved to a massive size—“island gigantism,” the phenomenon is called. They grow to eleven feet long, three hundred pounds, and their attacks on man are well documented. The animal’s tail is as lethal as its bite.
Their hunting technique is also well documented. Indonesian monitors use their tails to knock their prey to the ground, then inflict one or more tearing bites. Then they wait patiently. When the wounded victim is immobile—it doesn’t have to be dead—the monitor begins to feed.
For more than a century, biologists believed that carrion-borne bacteria in the lizard’s mouth is what caused paralysis in victims, man and animal alike. It is now known, however, that the monitor lizards of Komodo are indeed venomous. At least one very fine Australian scientist is now assembling evidence that most, if not all, monitors are equipped with poison glands.
They are an ancient species articulately equipped for survival.
I had seen monitors on islands near Sumatra that were the size of rottweilers, not lapdogs, that, with their viper tongues, wind-scented primates as quickly as carrion. One time, on the island of Gili Motang, on the Suva Sea, an Australian friend and I had found the claw and tail prints of a big monitor on a beach beneath coconut palms not far from the lagoon where we had anchored our boat.
The two of us spent the afternoon tracking the animal through dense Indonesian rain forest. A couple hours before sunset, my friend and I were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so we returned to the lagoon and our little ridged hull inflatable.
We hadn’t lost the monitor lizard, it turned out. She was in the shadows waiting on us. It was one of the big females, probably a couple hundred pounds. She was ten feet tall, standing on her hind legs in a thicket of traveler’s palms as if begging for a treat.
It was a rare encounter. Her tongue had probed the air experimentally like a snake, tasting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. She’d been shadowing us the whole time, we guessed later, anticipating our moves. Why she didn’t press her attack as we backed away toward our boat and then escaped by sea, we didn’t know.
Days later, an Indonesian naturalist, who was as knowledgeable as she was beautiful, suggested it was because some Komodo monitors are nocturnal hunters, either by predilection or genetic coding, so the animal was waiting for nightfall to attack.
If the naturalist was right, sunlight had saved us, not our quick feet.
King’s voice interrupted my thoughts, chiding me from the shoreline. “Hurry back, now—you hear, Jock-a-mo! Bring your new boyfriend something real pretty, okay? Perry’s waiting!”
Because I suspected he would do it, I had my hands up, shielding my eyes, when he tried to blind me with one of my own flashlights. A second later, a chunk of rock the size of a baseball landed in the water nearby. By the time I’d made it to my marker buoy, the man had lobbed three more rocks at me. I’m not often tempted to reply with a middle finger, but I was tempted now.
Instead, I turned away from the rocks and the blinding light and used night vision to have a last look toward the swamp The third monitor lizard had returned to the bank—a presence I found reassuring instead of disturbing. If three small lizards were in attendance, it suggested that a very large gator or croc was nowhere in the area.
I tested my regulator, then checked my new watch, a Graham Chronofighter. My pals at the marina had given it to me as a present—Tomlinson’s idea, as I knew. It had a big round face that was luminous with orange numerals. The watch read 7:22 p.m.
I twisted the bezel, marking the time of my descent, and then I deflated my BC. I submerged, feetfirst, using the buoy line to feel my way downward.
The water was clear again. Details of my fins and my hands were bright through the monocular. Soon, when I could distinguish the bottom, I turned and began to kick slowly downward, hearing the crackle of fast-twitch muscle fiber as fish spooked ahead of me. Sand appeared a luminous blue and fossilized oysters were black—a dinosaur-e
ra tableau that created a nagging worry in the back of my brain. I wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with those three monitor lizards, flicking their tongues, wind-profiling me, before I had submerged.
It took a minute to formulate the details, but it finally came to me. The results were unsettling: Nile monitor lizards are diurnal, unlike their monster-sized cousins in Indonesia. They hunt at sunrise and they hunt at sunset, but they spend their days and nights underground.
What were the three lizards doing outside their dens watching me long after sunset? Why were Nile monitors hunting at night?
NINETEEN
NEAR THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KARST TUNNEL, AS I reached for the mammoth tusk to steady myself, I stopped and listened, aware that something large had entered the water somewhere above me.
It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud, but the object had weight. The awareness came to me as a feeling, not a linear observation. Water, displaced by mass, exerts an expanding wave of pressure. I sensed the subtle force before the vibration registered in my ears.
My first thought was that Perry had forced King into the lake to help me with the jet dredge.
But, no . . . it wasn’t King. I had heard only the percussion of entry, no amateurish thrashing and splashing. It wasn’t King and it certainly wasn’t Perry.
It was something else—something not human, I felt sure. An inanimate object possibly. It could have been a boulder or a chunk of tree trunk. I pictured King throwing something big into the water, another attempt to irritate me. In him, humor took the form of harassment when violence wasn’t an option.
Maybe so, but he hadn’t thrown a chunk of wood. Wood floats. Whatever had breached the surface now continued to move. I could hear it, descending rapidly down the lake’s incline. It made a scraping, clanking noise that was impossible to identify.
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